Posts tagged “sociology”
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 […]
Double disruption
Pain obliterates identity, but the loss of identity in chronic illness isn’t simply a function of pain. It is also a result of constant gaslighting about the experience of your own body. Pain is a mysterious and terrifying force. It makes sense that pain destroys us. Being told by a loved one that you are […]
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 […]
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 […]