Pain and Prejudice A call to arms for women and their bodies
Reviewed By Janet Mawdesley November 3, 2019
Author Gabrielle Jackson
Distributor: Allen and Unwin
ISBN: 9781760529093
Publisher: Allen and Unwin
Release Date: September 2019
Website: https://www.allenandunwin.com
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In this ground breaking work, Pain and Prejudice, Gabrielle Jackson has drawn the attention of the women of world to a situation that almost more than fifty years after the Woman’s Liberation efforts of the late 1960’s and ‘70’s, should not need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the spotlight of modern medicine relating to woman health.
It seems incredible that so many issues dealing with women’s health are still misunderstood by the medical profession, particularly pain when relating to the menstrual cycle, sex, migraine, stress, IBS, and so much more. That women have pain is considered to be, unfortunately an acceptable issue, something that comes with being a woman and therefor not really worth placing a great emphasis on solving.
That this attitude is still alive and well is hard to believe but it is, as Jackson found out, the further into her investigation of endometriosis she went, she was horrified to discover that in the fourteen years since she was diagnosed with this painful, distressing and physical disease, so little in the treatment and knowledge of the condition had changed.
Sharing her very personal story via The Guardian, it opened a floodgate of stories from other women, which lead on to the exploration of a very wide field of women’s health issues which are still largely disregarded by the medical profession and remain under researched and often untreated.
Facts rub shoulders with personal stories told by women who have struggled with issues from painful periods to deep mental health issues, the disbelief of Doctors, the failure to diagnose correctly in relation to women’s health issues and the outrageous fact, that men and men’s health takes precedence often, particularly when it come to trialling many pain alternatives.
Anger is also laced throughout the pages, frustration its bed mate, that the social history spaning decades is little changed, that so many women are keep ill-informed of their medical condition, that so many Doctors and medical professionals still dismiss their claims as ‘hysteria’, that in so many ways, so little appears to have changed.
Jackson also investigates why so many women turn to alternative medicines as a way forward, drawing attention to the very real issue of why they choose to seek alternatives to treatment and better health outcomes and in doing so calls on the modern Medical fraternity to move on from the gender specific practice of medicine and into the world of multi gender treatment and understanding.
Pain and Prejudice is a tour de force and should be read by everyone, not just women!