First it’s railway spine, so you’re immediately injected into this contested illness. She was a woman, which is immediately going to make it less likely that her pain is going to heard or believed. We know that is true today; I think we have very good to reason to think that would have been true at that time as well.
She was fat. We know that, then and now, people who live in fat bodies are at a much higher rate of being stigmatized, of being disbelieved, as being regarded as not credible. (Just so we’re clear, when I use the word “fat,” it’s a political choice. I’m using it the way fat studies scholars and fat activists use it, not the medicalized term “obesity.”)
And she was “unchaste.” In the late Victorian era, all these things would have been killers. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. The court basically said this woman is not credible at all. There’s no way that the amount of damages that was awarded to her could possibly be consistent with the truth of her illness. Therefore, we’re going to reduce the damages.
From: The Long History of Discrimination in Pain Medicine – The Atlantic
Pain is a Problem in medicine.
Literally, people have different scales for pain. You say it’s 5, I say it’s 8, and we’re both experiencing the same pain. This is actually rather normal for self-report anything, but with pain, it’s often your only way to diagnose.
And that’s because the medical research into pain has been handicapped. (I also assert without any special research today that it is more susceptible to placebo effect).Report
No only that, but since the Feds regulate the market, they keep a close eye on people and doctors, so much so that doctors are very wary.
And let’s not forget big pharma’s role is creating this whole mess.Report
Pain in very interesting.
pain:medicine::gravity:physics
It’s foundational and everything follows from it, but we don’t really understand its basic nature at all.Report