There are many gender biases in the healthcare system. Joelle Palmieri experiences the effects of this every day, at the hospital, in her practice, at the CPAM (French social security office)... Yet gender is not taught in medical schools. Stéphanie Ranque-Garnier, an algologist at the Marseille Public Hospital System, and Nadine Chard’homme, a nurse at the Namur Pain Centre, are happy to testify to this. Muriel Salle, a health historian, is categorical: medicine routinely differentiates between the sexes according to feminine or masculine ‘essence’, biology or physiology, which abstracts it from the social context, education, culture, history, etc. As a result, women and men have unequal access to healthcare because perceptions of women’s bodies have changed little: mood swings, cycle-related disorders, hysteria. All of these androcentric ideas feed into the gender agnotology of medicine. When it comes to pain, doctors readily lump patients’ symptoms into a ‘catch-all’ category of unexplained pathologies because pain is considered normal in women. The prescription of APA echoes a second form of essentialism, that of sport. Christine Mennesson, a sociologist of sport, describes the extent to which this essentialism is inscribed on women’s bodies.

Copyright © Joelle Palmieri and Virginie Jortay

Credits:
Excerpt from the documentary ‘Clinical Trials of the Future,’ Pharmaceutical Companies
Excerpt from the documentary ‘1952: The Lamaze Method, an Obstetric Revolution,’ INA Archive
Excerpt from the documentary ‘Sex and Pain,’ Dr. Renato Colamarino
Excerpt from an interview with Sabine Arnaud about her book ‘The Invention of Hysteria in the Age of Enlightenment 1670-1820’
Excerpt from the documentary ‘Cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death among women’, VO news
Song ‘Juste une femme’ by Anne Sylvestre

Links:
Nacu, A. and Benamouzig, D. (2010). Fibromyalgia: from public issue to patient experience. Public Health, Vol. 22(5), 551-562. https://doi.org/10.3917/spub.105.0551
The Unthought pain – Feminist autopsy of fibromyalgia, a ‘women’s disease’: https://joellepalmieri.org/2021/08/23/fibromyalgie-derriere-la-porte/

With: Stéphanie Ranque-Garnier, algologist at the Marseille Public Hospital System, Nadine Chardhomme, nurse at the Namur Pain Centre, Muriel Salle, health historian, and Christine Mennesson, sports sociologist.

Production team:
Writing, interviews and production: Joelle Palmieri
Editing and mixing: Virginie Jortay
Voice-over: Peggy Pierrot