Ross Douthat
speaker
328 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2022
last heard Mar 2022
Ross Douthat’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Herxheimer style reaction, which in my case, which is not always the normal case, involved rubbing at the areas of my body that hurt, moving them, you know, needing to like move around, stomp my feet, all this extremely strange stuff.
But once that happened, once I figured
That out in the long run, it helped me actually get better.
But in the short run, just the feeling of being able to predict what would happen when you took certain substances was really, really psychologically important because prior to that, you're just throwing things into your body and have no sense of like what is helping, what is not, no sense of predictability about what your symptoms are from day to day.
So having that predictability was itself a breakthrough even before I started to really improve.
It's important to stress because in these interviews, as in my initial consultations with doctors, you want to stress your own reasonability, and as a reasonable person, I can see that all of this is very, very strange to describe, and I can only say that it was even stranger to experience.
It's been interesting.
The review and slate of the book made a version of that sort of positive argument, saying that it's good to have Ross Doutha not only a man but a conservative newspaper columnist.
offering this account as a kind of legitimizing force for an illness that is easy to discount for reasons of sexism.
I've had women say to me, what does it feel like to have written a very female book, Ross?
You know,
you've gotten that reaction.
A friend who has written her own book about chronic illness, Megan O'Rourke, who I did a conversation with for the New York Times.
She said it was actually for relief to read about me hitting the wall with so many doctors because she felt like they treated me the way they treated her.
And maybe it wasn't just sexism.
Maybe there's something
you know, sort of more universal about the experience that a man can have this kind of experience too.
Sexism obviously plays an important role, given the fact that most of the doctors I saw were men.
The medical profession is not male-dominated anymore, but it still is male-tilting.
But I also think there's a sense, this is one of the theories for why women are more likely to present with chronic illness, that women are more
Showing 241–260 of 328 · page 13 of 17
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