Last year around this same time, as Robin and I were madly writing away, we were also working with the talented staff at our publisher to come up with a title for our book. I was carrying around a little spiral notebook, and constantly jotting down words and phrases immediately as they came to me for possible use in a title. And there were endless emails of endless lists of ideas shooting back and forth. At one point, I even got out a thesaurus (an abbreviated one of course) and paged through lists and lists of adjectives.

One day, during this time, I was looking after my 8 year old neighbor while her mother was at work, and she naturally became curious about all the time I was spending at the computer and about all the books scattered all over the room. And asked what I was doing. So I told her that my friend and I were writing a book, which of course prompted many more questions – why were we doing it, what was it about, who was it for. After I answered these, she asked what the title was going to be and I told her we didn’t know yet.

So, she immediately said that she had one: “ It’s Your Health, But We Help.”

I laughed, told her it was a great idea, and promptly went back to my thesaurus and other books and computer.

Finally, after months of trying to come up with a title, we realized that what would help the most, as it always does, was to go back to the basics – why we were writing the book in the first place.

We were trying to accomplish several things at once with our book, all based on what we had learned from our own patients over the years. One thing we were trying to do was simplify the huge amount of complicated medical information flying around out there; to pull out the pieces relevant to women in midlife and older, and get down to the basic health issues that all of us need to know in order to best take care of ourselves in the twenty-first century.

We were also trying to prioritize those issues so that you, our readers, would learn which ones simply had to be taken care of regularly or immediately, and which did not. Especially given the state of the healthcare environment today, in which doctors and other clinicians are not able, even though we’d like, to spend the lengthy amounts of time with each patient that we used to. That time just isn’t available anymore. But, that’s another story/blog.

Back to our book. We had two focuses: to make you aware of the most common diseases that occur as we grow older, and of how to prevent them; and, because no matter how well we take care of ourselves we all get sick at some point, to let you know what symptoms indicate true health emergencies and what you should do about them.

But, even with all of the above in our book, we knew one thing for sure, the one thing that we’ve learned from our patients over and over again. That is, that no matter how much information we give or recommendations we make, each of us has to want, and to decide, to do the things that are necessary to stay healthy as we grow older. Our book can only be your roadmap; you’re driving the car.

You now know, of course, what title was chosen. And we’re very pleased with it. But when we need something that sums up our philosophy and that of our book, shorter than its title, we’ve got our “soundbite”:

It’s Your Health, But We Help. 

Janet Horn