Keeping the Women we Love Healthy

Dr. Sheila Moody at Howell Luncheon in November  In our continued efforts to better the health of women, in 2012, the Howell Foundation made a commitment to fund research partnerships between academic and community-based organizations. The goal of our Community Engagement Initiative (CEI) is to support these partnerships; working collaboratively to develop and evaluate programs designed to improve women’s health. Our priority is to ensure the development of evidenced-informed projects that address relevant issues affecting women’s health within the greater San Diego community, with an emphasis on underserved women. The 2018 Community Engagement Initiative recipient is Dr. Sheila Mody, MD MPH.  She is Director, Fellowship in Family Planning; Director, Division of Family Planning at the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences of University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Her project will focus on anayzing how culture influences family planning h...

Jessica Zhang is a newly minted MD serving on our Board of Directors. It is amazing how many things she is able to do for the Howell Foundation, all while pursuing her residency in Emergency Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital/UCSF. The philosophy of life of this young doctor is, quite frankly, contagious.  Taking a preventive approach on the road to personalized medicine is, perhaps, the most important factor in achieving health.  But that is just my opinion!  Read the wise words of Dr. Zhang, who no doubt will become one of THE best doctors! "My hope is that my future career is filled with sudden and unpredictable accidents – this sounds terrible, but hear me out. There are two ways to approach medicine.  The first is to react to a problem that already exists; the second is to prevent the problem from occurring. Our health care system approaches health from the first perspective. With increasingly rare exception, health is only addressed after you a...

The Doris Howell Foundation starts the year with the lecture “Understanding the genome 10,000 experiments at a time: applying genomic approaches to understand autoimmune disease in women" with Sonia Sharma, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Division of Cell Biology, La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology and Director of the Institute’s RNAi Facility. I want to say that, as with everything that has to do with women, 10,000 experiments to better understand autoimmune disease in women sounds about right.  But ask any woman with an autoimmune disease, and it is definitely no laughing matter; even though the warriors that live with autoimmune disease might often joke about it themselves.   For reasons that are yet not fully understood, autoimmune diseases affect more women than men.  As an example: The statistics are stunning! According to the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association, Inc.:   To start, it is quite diff...