An Unscientific Explanation of Unscientific Things
Why women may be more likely to try miracle cures and non-standard treatments
Content: There is some frank discussions around food/fasting/restrictive diets sold as miracle cure in this one if that’s something you’d rather skip.
I am not a scientist, and this experiment is flawed: the sample is not randomized, also it’s not really an experiment, also I know nothing about data sets. It’s qualitative, not quantitative. It’s a mish-mash of ideas and theories. It’s, as always, my thoughts.
A lot of things have fed this idea. Basically, I am online. I get lots of targeted ads for combinations of curing my “gut,” “anxiety,” “skin,” “PMS.” I am pretty good at ignoring most of these. However: I do have anxiety, my skin is imperfect, sometimes I bloat to the point of appearing to be in my second trimester. Some of these issues feel mostly cosmetic (acne), but others are genuinely uncomfortable. Sometimes I can be both bloated and hungry, my abdomen too distended to comfortably eat yet nausea setting in as my blood sugar drops. Cramps and acid-y burning. I can manage it okay, but I don’t totally understand what is happening. I hold and am given theories on why it happens and every five or so years a doctor will try to run a test that comes back inconclusive (pancreatic function, stomach emptying, endoscopy, allergen skin testing) or a new medication regime (omeprazole, zantac, and zofran; specialty GI antibiotics; lexapro) that seems to help and then stops working, and then we just quietly agree to leave the question alone. The official line is anxiety, which isn’t untrue, but feels like not enough. Anxiety has also been used to explain my muscle problems: I have had multiple partial dislocations of my right shoulder, the left is nearly there, low back spasms, poor circulation/numbness in my extremities, etc. At my age, and with no history of catastrophic injury, there is no good answer, apparently. During my last shoulder dislocation, I ended up getting a contrast MRI. The result? There was “nothing wrong” with my shoulder, except for the part where it wasn’t fully in the socket. With no torn labrum or visible bone deformity, with no surgical option, there was no more to do. Case closed.
Half the women I know have something like this. Something that’s not quite right, but generally not acute enough, or with a quickly discernable answer to be identified. It’s hard not feeling like you’re being overlooked, or that you seem like a hypochondriac, a complainer. I know some men with these issues as well, but it seems to skew more female.
I’m thinking about this right now because, instead of exploring New Orleans today, I’ve been in my hotel room, feeling vaguely nauseous for hours after throwing caution to the wind and eating delicious things that I probably shouldn’t have. Also, because of something I read in The Times the other day. Nicholas Kristof wrote “Why Americans Feel More Pain” to investigate the rise in middle-aged chronic pain sufferers in America as opposed to other developed countries. Some of his discussion centers on opioid use, on support for American laborers, but most of all, it speaks to the sense of despair that hits the population he is examining, focusing on this brain-body interplay that feeds the pain cycle. That, and that 75% of chronic pain sufferers are women. Apparently testosterone helps manage pain, but I’ve grown up being told that women have higher pain tolerances than men, something about equipping us to deal with childbirth and menstrual cramps. (which, if this isn’t the case, I have a lot of feelings about how gynecology/ obstetrics work in this nation and the expectation of women to just deal with discomfort.) Maybe the testosterone level is part of it, but it seems likely to me that the chronic pain in women is often the result of the acute or traumatic pain being so often discounted or ignored.
As someone who has a form of anxiety that is almost entirely somatic, that the brain and body are hopelessly intertwined is clear to me. I did not face childhood trauma, I have a BA—basically, I am not the demographic Kristof is describing. Mine is probably just genetics—epigenetics, the trauma of the generations before me (both of my grandfather’s with PTSD, the depression and anxiety that run rampant through my lineage) that has in parts allowed me to be more attuned to the world around me, and also forced me to have to listen to more than is perhaps necessary.
I would not classify myself as someone who has chronic pain so much as frequent discomfort. The stomach pain is only a problem in that it triggers panic (am I getting sick? If so, could I infect someone else? Will I need to rush out of this meeting/movie/concert and in doing so alarm others?) which in turn makes the stomach pain worse until the thing spirals out of control. If it wasn’t for my anxiety, I probably could have just felt like shit for a few hours today and then gone back out on the town.
Though I primarily work from my own experiences, I see the frustration with lack of diagnoses and clear, effective treatments in other women. I have one friend whose sister experienced serious autoimmune symptoms and only found relief, after months of testing and treatment protocols, in non-western treatments. Friends and family who swear by combinations of acupuncture, massage, diet, supplements.
A massage and acupuncture practitioner suggested that I try an IgG test last summer, a non-standard immune system food sensitivity test. Their accuracy and efficacy is not well-established, but in one of those moments of frustration, I did the test. It confirmed certain things I suspected—extreme sensitivity to sugar (cane especially, but if I drink a glass of orange juice on an empty stomach, I’m sweating, shaking, and nauseous in 20 minutes) and suggested other foods I should avoid or limit. Some of it has been helpful, but it also seems as if my symptoms are now worse than ever if I do have small amounts of those sensitive foods. Eating out is now a fraught exercise, and I feel like no one can cook for me anymore, which embarasses me to the extreme. As someone who uses food as hospitality, I hate being unable to reciprocate, to try something that someone has cooked.
There is evidence, referenced in the Kristof article, that some non-standard treatments work, like massage, physical therapy, and forms of meditation, particularly for the ways in which they can help relax the brain, can begin to interrupt that mind/body feedback loop. In my experience, deep tissue massage helps to release muscles that are so tight they sometimes pull my vertebra out of alignment, my abdominals like taut rope, restricting the movements of my lungs, stomach, intestines. I sometimes have to manually massage my stomach to aid digestion, to make cramps go away, to stand up straight, to breathe more easily. It’s an annoying thing to have to do, and sometimes I do it a little too hard, leaving small purple bruises around my belly button.
These physical manipulations are fairly well accepted now—at least, massage and dry-needling are partially covered by my insurance provider, indicating a larger trend toward acceptance in western medicine. I struggle with meditation, but acupuncture almost always puts me to sleep, and I can see and feel the edema in my ankles, face, subside after a session.
But the more fringe things, the promises of gut health resets and not just treating, but curing auto-immune disease through fascia-manipulation, remind me of fad diets. Perhaps there is some short-term benefit to these protocols, but the promises tend to fail. Yet. Yet we gravitate toward them. In periods when everything I eat seems to hurt my stomach, I entertain the idea of fasting for a few days to allow my stomach to “heal,” the promises, testimonials so enticing. I never commit to the fast, as the peaks of pain and nausea always fade, letting me think clearly again, not act in desperation. But if they didn’t?
What’s the point here? I think I’m trying to say that women are not, as a gender, somehow dumber, more easily manipulated. It’s more a weariness, I think that drives the willingness to try the less tested, the stranger, fringe cures. Sometimes these non-western ideas can be useful: I had a massage therapist who characterized her work as dealing in subtleties, attending to small misalignments before they spiral out. That by contrast, traditional medicine only attends to things when they get very bad. Something akin to the “ounce of prevention” ideal. This mindset helps me—reminds that if I attend to small discomforts, I can usually correct them before they make things worse. But, she also believed that you could eat enough St. John’s Wort to replace Prozac, so I don’t exactly hold her as a guru.
Go on Twitter, reddit, any open forum to find the shared frustrations of women interacting with doctors. The most terrifying usually surround birth and gynecological issues, but the sense of not being heard or believed makes it difficult to continue to try to seek help through these avenues. I guess this is my, “believe women,” but when they’re patients. Or at least, listen, and maybe don’t give up so quickly. If you do, then help will be sought elsewhere, and not always for the best.