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A review by pineconek
Doing Harm: The Truth about How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery
4.0
An excellent and extremely depressing look into medical misogyny and how women's symptoms are routinely dismissed in the medical profession. There was a lot of emphasis on how medicine is still building its knowledge base and the gap between where research is vs what doctors know.
While I appreciated the intersectionality in many parts of the book, something about how mental illness was discussed irked me. While I understand the author wanting to present a strong dichotomy between real illness and psychiatric illness to emphasize that symptoms aren't just 'in our heads', this manfiested as a routine dismissal of how, when, and why psychiatric and physical illnesses interact and why the line between them isn't so clear could.
All that said, this book still comes widely recommended if you've ever been dismissed by a doctor, are interested in women's health beyond reproductive health, and are interested in challenging what you may think about "fashionable" diseases.
While I appreciated the intersectionality in many parts of the book, something about how mental illness was discussed irked me. While I understand the author wanting to present a strong dichotomy between real illness and psychiatric illness to emphasize that symptoms aren't just 'in our heads', this manfiested as a routine dismissal of how, when, and why psychiatric and physical illnesses interact and why the line between them isn't so clear could.
All that said, this book still comes widely recommended if you've ever been dismissed by a doctor, are interested in women's health beyond reproductive health, and are interested in challenging what you may think about "fashionable" diseases.