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Tim Barrus: The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/opinion/girls-pain-sexual-abuse.html?comments#permid=30675672

The male-dominated medical establishment has failed us all.

Men reject the charge of complete and utter failure. Example: Women are almost never mentioned and never portrayed in any of the uninspired rhetoric campaigns focused on HIV treatment. The stick figures employed are always male and always designed to get men into treatment while being engaged in sports in the park and playing frisbee with the dog.

This is a lie. HIV is not a great day in the park playing baseball and frisbee and the dog is replacement for female. Rendered mute. Gender rules everything. Dyskinesia is the tip of the iceberg. According to the rules, women should be quiet while enduring their pain in waiting rooms.

HIV – like dyskinesia itself – inherently causes pain. The medical community will and does deny it. But based on what.

A status quo where pain is overwhelmingly treated with  opiates whose effectiveness is seen in an economic context, not a scientific one where other therapies cannot be and are not considered when addiction is more lucrative than any other modality that targets pain. We know very little about pain because we rarely confront the consequences of not treating it, and the most vulnerable of us are dismissed as being ephemeral. Where I live in Appalachia, the dead are everywhere. Our local cemetery is filled.

Scientific reports get cited as facts where scientific reports are managed overwhelmingly by men in a landscape where silence equals death. Especially for the vulnerable.