Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health Review
- 5 years ago
https://collmenpake-n.blogspot.com/?book=022617915X
Migraine is a major public health issue, costing the US economy, by one recent estimate, at least $32 billion per year?$17 billion in treatment and $15 billion in missed work. Its personal toll is apparent to anyone who has the disorder?an estimated ten percent of the world?s population. In?Not Tonight, Joanna Kempner examines why migraine, one of the most common, disabling, and painful disorders, is nonetheless frequently dismissed, ignored, and delegitimized. She argues that this general dismissal of migraine can be traced back to the gendered social values embedded in the way we talk about, understand, and make policies for people in pain. Because the symptoms that accompany headache disorders?like head pain, visual auras, and sensitivity to sound?lack an objective marker of distress that can confirm their existence, doctors rely on the perceived moral character of their patients to gauge how serious their complaints are. Kempner shows how this problem plays out in the history of migraine, from nineteenth-century formulations of migraine as a disorder of upper-class intellectual men and hysterical women to the influential concept of ?migraine personality? in the 1940s, in which women with migraine were described as uptight neurotics who withheld sex, to contemporary depictions of people with highly sensitive ?migraine brains.??Not Tonight?casts new light on how cultural beliefs about gender, pain, and the distinction between mind and body influence not only whose suffering we legitimate, but which remedies are marketed, how medicine is practiced, and how knowledge about disease is produced.
Migraine is a major public health issue, costing the US economy, by one recent estimate, at least $32 billion per year?$17 billion in treatment and $15 billion in missed work. Its personal toll is apparent to anyone who has the disorder?an estimated ten percent of the world?s population. In?Not Tonight, Joanna Kempner examines why migraine, one of the most common, disabling, and painful disorders, is nonetheless frequently dismissed, ignored, and delegitimized. She argues that this general dismissal of migraine can be traced back to the gendered social values embedded in the way we talk about, understand, and make policies for people in pain. Because the symptoms that accompany headache disorders?like head pain, visual auras, and sensitivity to sound?lack an objective marker of distress that can confirm their existence, doctors rely on the perceived moral character of their patients to gauge how serious their complaints are. Kempner shows how this problem plays out in the history of migraine, from nineteenth-century formulations of migraine as a disorder of upper-class intellectual men and hysterical women to the influential concept of ?migraine personality? in the 1940s, in which women with migraine were described as uptight neurotics who withheld sex, to contemporary depictions of people with highly sensitive ?migraine brains.??Not Tonight?casts new light on how cultural beliefs about gender, pain, and the distinction between mind and body influence not only whose suffering we legitimate, but which remedies are marketed, how medicine is practiced, and how knowledge about disease is produced.