Name: Pain and Prejudice
ISBN: 9781760529093

Gabrielle Jackson

An incredibly important and powerful look at how our culture treats the pain and suffering of women in medical and social contexts. A polemic on the state of women's health and healthcare.

How Social Taboos and Medical Ignorance Keep Women Sick and Suffering

Pain and Prejudice

Karolina

Medical science has played a historic role in perpetuating ideas that menstruation is unsafe, unclean and unmentionable.

That's right: PubMed has almost five times as many clinical trials on male sexual pleasure as it has on female sexual pain. And why? Because we live in a culture that sees female pain as normal and male pleasure as a right.

This is such an important read. Learning to advocate for yourself as a woman — especially as a woman of colour — within medical environments is so key to getting help and staying alive, often. 

It’s not a dense read either which is rare for a book like this.

Bits get repetitive for sure and it doesn’t go deep enough on the challenges women of colour face or how to solve it (some of it because there’s not enough research) but I still highly recommend it. 

Anisah Osman Britton

This is such an important read. Learning to advocate for yourself as a woman — especially as a woman of colour — within medical environments is so key to getting help and staying alive, often. 

It’s not a dense read either which is rare for a book like this.

Bits get repetitive for sure and it doesn’t go deep enough on the challenges women of colour face or how to solve it (some of it because there’s not enough research) but I still highly recommend it. 

A timely and powerful look at how our culture treats the pain and suffering of women.

A Call to Arms for Women and Their Bodies

Despite having read multiple books about how the world ignores women’s pain, this book still managed to provide new, enraging facts, especially in Australian context.

GABRIELLE. JACKSON

An incredibly important and powerful look at how our culture treats the pain and suffering of women in medical and social contexts. A polemic on the state of women's health and healthcare. One in ten women worldwide have endometriosis, yet is is funded at 5% of the rate of diabetes; women are half as likely to be treated for a heart attack as men and twice as likely to die six months after discharge; over half of women who are eventually diagnosed with an autoimmune disease will be told they are hypochondriacs or have a mental illness. These are just a few of the shocking statistics explored in this book. Fourteen years after being diagnosed with endometriosis, Gabrielle Jackson couldn't believe how little had changed in the treatment and knowledge of the disease. In 2015, her personal story kick-started a worldwide investigation into the disease by the Guardian; thousands of women got in touch to tell their own stories and many more read and shared the material. What began as one issue led Jackson to explore how women - historically and through to the present day - are under-served by the systems that should keep them happy, healthy and informed about their bodies. Pain and Prejudice is a vital testament to how social taboos and medical ignorance keep women sick and in anguish. The stark reality is that women's pain is not taken as seriously as men's. Women are more likely to be disbelieved and denied treatment than men, even though women are far more likely to be suffering from chronic pain. In a potent blend of polemic and memoir, Jackson confronts the private concerns and questions women face regarding their health and medical treatment. Pain and Prejudice, finally, explains how we got here, and where we need to go next.

Pain and Prejudice How Social Taboos and Medical Ignorance Keep Women Sick and Suffering

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