Posts tagged “Chronic Illness”
Your illness is not your fault
“I have to live inside of this body that sometimes hurts itself.”
I don’t want to try to get better anymore
My roommate was reading The Parasite Underground and quoted me the bit about trying different drugs, doses, timing: If you have a terrible reaction to hookworm — which isn’t uncommon — you might start over with smaller doses, and gradually introduce larvae over a longer period of time. Different organisms might also work for different […]
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
Migraine complicates the relationship between specific disease and legitimation. Migraine has a well-established diagnosis, a subspecialty in medicine that is devoted to its treatment, brain imaging that illustrates a migraine in process, pharmacological interventions, research that links certain forms of migraine to genetic mutations, insurance companies and policy makers that recognize its existence (albeit to […]
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 […]
chronicillnessproblems: clairetheelectrick: What abled people don’t understand is that self-advocacy is so, SO EXHAUSTING. It pushes us to our limits, it forces us to expend energy (that we often don’t have) to demand basic human rights, rights that abled bodies and minds get without even knowing it. What so utterly frustrates me is that I […]
Migraine Log as of May 5
The sensations of my own body may be the only subject on which I am qualified to claim expertise. Sad and terrible, then, how little I know. “How do you feel?” the doctor asks, and I cannot answer. Not accurately. “Does this hurt?” he asks. Again, I’m not sure. “Do you have more or less […]