A free health festival is coming to Geelong to share knowledge and resources supporting the region’s health and wellbeing.
Geelong West Town Hall will host the inaugural Health Festival of Geelong on Saturday, July 20, from 1pm to 4pm, which aims to help people navigate Geelong’s health system.
Doctor Jenny Huang said she wanted to bring the festival to Geelong to help the community discover health services closer to home.
“There’s a greater divide between what the health professionals know and what the public knows due to many systemic reasons,” she said.
“Then, when the community can’t access health professionals’ advice for whatever reason, the other way is through the internet or social media.
“I wanted to create an opportunity for the community to be able to directly engage with the local resources that are there, because you don’t know what you don’t know until you come across it.”
Dr Huang said her other objective behind starting up the festival was to bring difficult conversations about complex topics, such as pelvic pain, out into the open.
“It’s about normalising and allowing people to not feel ashamed or feel like they’re going to have to be faced with judgement,” she said.
“For centuries, things like endometriosis and pelvic pain have been labelled as hysteria… We don’t tell someone who’s going through a heart attack or chest pain to take some aspirin.
“The brain is an incredible organ where we don’t understand the full extent of it and how the pain pathway works. To write it off as, ‘you just have to bear it’, it’s undervaluing the complexity of the neurological system.”
