Posts tagged “joanna kempner”
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
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 […]
Although neurobiology offers a biological explanation for migraine, this explanatory framework may have less power to legitimate migraine if it is understood in terms that replicate already existing assumptions about men and women in pain. stakeholders’ best attempts to legitimate migraine are undermined by cultural meanings of headache and migraine that are overlaid with assumptions […]
Not Tonight examines how migraine can simultaneously disrupt so many lives and continue to be questioned and trivialized by the culture at large. Why do some kinds of pain generate deep sympathy and hefty economic investment, while other kinds are ignored? Why do we privilege and even praise some sorts of pain, while others are […]