Pain and Prejudice: How the Medical System Ignores Women And What We Can Do About It

In Pain and Prejudice, acclaimed investigative journalist Gabrielle Jackson takes readers behind the scenes of doctors' offices, pharmaceutical companies and research laboratories to show that - at almost every level of healthcare - men's health claims are treated as the default, while women's claims are often seen as typical, exaggerated or even completely fabricated. The consequences of this bias? Women waste time, money and lives trying to navigate a healthcare system designed for men. Almost all medical research is now carried out on men or mice, so that most treatments are tailored to male bodies only. Even illnesses that are overwhelmingly more common in women, such as chronic pain, are mainly tested on male bodies. Meanwhile, women regularly report feeling ignored at the doctor's office. Jackson interweaves these and the book's more stunning findings with her own story of suffering from endometriosis, a disease that affects up to 20% American women but is poorly understood and often misdiagnosed. It also includes a timely epilogue on how Covid-19 affects women differently, and sometimes more permanently, than men.