Posts filed under “Books”
When your worldview and the world collide
Cheyne did not, however, see weak nerves as entirely unhealthy. The thinner and more fragile the nerve, the more quickly it could transmit a quality called “sense.” “Sensibility” conveyed aesthetic, intellectual, and social refinement, made one a “quick Thinker,” and provided the “most lively imagination.” Talented people were born with “organs finer, quicker, more agile, […]
Join the convent!
In Western medicine, headache disorders have long been understood as complaints that are rooted in the body but that maintain intimate relationships with emotions. Even as far back as Plato’s Charmides, Socrates refuses to give the hero headache medicine till first he had eased his troubled mind; body and soul, he said, must be cured […]
I’m a bad bitch
the credibility and the legitimacy of a disorder—and how much we, as a society, choose to invest in its treatment—is intimately tied to how we perceive the moral character of the patient. Joanna Kempner in Not Tonight
When was the last time your migraine doctor caught up on the literature?
Over the centuries, physicians have placed migraine in various positions along the mind/body spectrum. Headache experts currently consider migraine a somatic disorder rooted in the brain. But this is a break from the past. Up until thirty years ago, doctors primarily viewed migraine as having both a psychological and a somatic basis. Joanna Kempner in […]
Migraine is dramatically under-researched and under-treated
Most people who have migraine are on the mild end of the spectrum; they might experience one to three headache days per month and lose some functionality as a result of symptoms. But about a quarter experience severe levels of disability associated with their symptoms. One to 3 percent of American adults are estimated to […]
Sexism affects your medical treatment in a thousand ways
stakeholders’ best attempts to legitimate migraine are undermined by cultural meanings of headache and migraine that are overlaid with assumptions about gender. These gender assumptions overdetermine how medical knowledge about headache disorders is produced, disseminated, and used. Joanna Kempner in Not Tonight
Theorists writing about the social construction of illness have argued that legitimacy in medicine is primarily dictated by a reductionist epistemology—that is, in Western societies, diseases are legitimate when real, and “real” refers to symptoms that can be linked to an identifiable, biological pathology. 38 Ideally, the pathology should be “specific,” meaning that the pathology […]