Posts tagged “joanna kempner”
Legitimate illness
What makes something a disease? And why would some people with migraine fight to have migraine recognized as a disease? Locating migraine in the brain is believed to alleviate personal responsibility, a dynamic that advocates think is important after decades of medical practitioners telling patients that their personalities caused their pain. Identifying migraine as genetic […]
It’s all in my head
People with migraine have a degraded “objective self” – that is, their “taken-for-granted notions, theories and tendencies regarding [their] human bodies, brains, and kinds” have been damaged. Sometimes people with migraine don’t even believe their own pain. – Joanna Kempner in Not Tonight. I remember crawling across a bathroom floor, vomiting, wondering what was wrong […]
Please visit me at home; everything is too much
The disability associated with severe cases of migraine extends far beyond days spent in bed. Online, people talk about the ways that migraine has rendered them housebound. Driving, for instance, can be difficult; shifting lights trigger migraines and drug side effects cause clumsiness. People with migraine stay home because they fear perfumes or other foreign […]
If you need so much help, why aren’t you asking for it?
In 2010, after a great deal of lobbying by an influential group of headache specialists, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) held a workshop on headache research that included a small group of people representing stakeholders in headache medicine: representatives from various NIH institutes, various headache organizations, headache specialists, researchers, and patient advocates. The meeting […]
I’ll wear the slinky dress and give up my art if you’ll invest in migraine research
In general, online communities embrace the biomedicalization of migraine, perhaps even more than their doctors do, in the service of legitimating migraine as a socially sanctioned disease — since they extend the neurobiological paradigm beyond what biomedical evidence currently supports. They do so because they believe that the neurobiological model is capable of remaking public […]
Migraine may affect my personality, but my personality didn’t give me migraine
Anna Eidt wrote recently about the “migraine personality,” an old and sexist idea that still influences how migraines are perceived and treated. It’s a succinct discussion and debunking of the idea. The “migraine personality” was coined in the early 20th century not long after Victorian doctors thought migraine to be a purely psychosomatic phenomenon. Headache researcher Harold […]
Duality
For headache specialists, reducing the disorder to a specific mechanism in the brain doesn’t just relieve the symptoms of migraine [referring to development of Imitrex]; it also targets the stigma associated with it by shifting responsibility for the pain away from a weak or neurotic personality toward a body over which the patient has no […]