Healers and Patients Talk: Narratives of a Chronic Gynecological Disease

(Hardback)

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Endometriosis is not a common word. Some people associate it with difficult patients, pain during sex, and infertility. Others link it to stigma, grief, and not being believed by their doctors. Healers and Patients Talk provides insight into interactions between patients and health professionals in the clinical setting. The author examines the varied and contested enactments of endometriosis, the multiple ways in which people understand and use the term endometriosis, and the complex pathway to the diagnosis. Endometriosis is a label historically bestowed on white, heterosexual, cisgendered career women, but the author offers ideas about how such exclusionary practices developed over time. This is an important ethnography of endometriosis which discusses new concepts, such as the authors theoretical contribution of the a-diagnostic category. Women living with endometriosis occupy this space and slip in and out of it, struggling to receive a diagnosis and treatment. This conceptual category may well apply to other chronic conditions that affect women. The author makes a significant contribution to scholarly understandings of endometriosis. The book considers recommendations for improving the care of endometriosis patients, shortening the time to diagnosis, and improving interactions between patients and care-givers.

Reviews

To tell the tale of endometriosis is to tell a tale of patients and doctors, of waiting for a diagnosis that, at last and at least, validates one's suffering as a medical condition, as opposed to being held in abeyance without it. It is to delve into the medical, sociological, and economic history of endometriosis, into myths of the female body, popular culture and its changing characterizations, and the psychology, for many women with endometriosis, of wearing the 'mask of health' while living with 'the monster inside.' In this book written by a physician-anthropologist with endometriosis, the tale is also an ethnographic exploration of the experiences of patients and doctors

that breaks the silence about a disease which afflicts ten percent of women worldwide. Healers and Patients Talk is a high and distinguished achievement as a narrative and study, and it will, as Vronique A. S. Griffith states as her reason for writing it, help many women, and perhaps their doctors, achieve and arrive at better care for patients with endometriosis.--Michael Rowe, Yale University

Author Bio

Vronique Griffith is research fellow at the Usher Institute in the Edinburgh School of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh.