Happy Girl Winter: How to Overcome Seasonal Depressive Disorder
Same Face, Different Brain: Learning to Live with Chronic Pain and Ableism After a Brain Injury
Things have gotten better, but the pain has never truly gone away. And I have had to spend all seven years defending my injury. Defending its existence. To doctors. To strangers. To family. To friends. It never mattered that I had documentation. That anyone who truly knew me could see the change in me, even if they could not describe it. It never mattered; they could not see it…
‘Madness’, Medical Misogyny and Misdiagnoses: The Woes of the Chronically Ill Woman
I would smile and nod along with whatever they said without ever asking questions. I didn’t understand what my mother had been trying to teach me. I let a lot of professionals tell me I was perfectly healthy even though I was struggling because I trusted them to know my body best. I got used to thinking, ‘that’s weird’, and going about my day in situations where most people would rush to a walk-in clinic…
Lost in Translation: How Language Around Women’s Pain Creates The Pain Gap
How can such different language be used to describe identical pain? As a scientist by training, I turned to recent research for answers. The critical problem appeared to be simple and, unfortunately, unsurprising. While kidney stones can affect everyone, ovarian cysts only affect people with wombs…
The Pain Gap: Why is Women’s Pain Not Taken Seriously?
The relationship between women and pain is an interesting one. Studies show that, globally, women experience more pain over their lifetimes than men. It is the expectation that women will inherently experience pain. This expectation forms the basis of the phenomena of the pain gap. This bias that women are expected to experience pain their entire lives is now deeply embedded into modern medical discourse…
Double, Double, Coil and Trouble: The History of Female Contraceptives and the Pursuit of Profit at the Expense of Women’s Health
When the oral contraceptive pill came out, it was lauded as a miracle. […] We should not, however, believe that the pill was (and still is) without drawbacks. This ‘miracle’ has a rather nasty history of coercion, misogyny, and malpractice, not to mention the lengthy and dangerous list of side effects.