About Me

I am female, middle-aged and unremarkable. I have an arts degree which is unsurprising because when I was a girl, few girls schools had science facilities (on the other hand, my brother attended a boys school that taught German but not French because the latter was “too feminine”). According to several commentators, this confluence of biographical details means that I am flaky, functionally incapable of understanding the wonders of science and medicine or the concept of evidence, prone to tantrums and superfluous. (Ben Goldacre, amongst too many others.)

Allegedly, you would have an easier time of it catching a falling star or learning to hear mermaids singing than locating an arts or humanities graduate who is curious about the world, alive to its wonders and capable of exercising critical thinking. For some benighted people, this seems to go double if the arts graduate is female (and it is embarrassing that some research possibly shows a smidgeon of evidence to support this when it comes to CAM usage,^(a) and that editors of women’s magazines and women’s sections in newspapers are complicit in treating women as if we hesitate over adding single digits, but my truthiness is that I can feel it is wrong).

It’s just as well we’ve made such remarkable social progress over the last century or one might think that we are back in the days when everyone knew that women suffered from hysteria because of the wandering uterus or when people wrote earnest reports and books about The Woman Question.

I’m irritated that some glib commentators blame people like me for the dumbing down of the media (I have no association with media or allied occupations except, indirectly, through my purchases). My trifling concerns are obviously related to the fact that feminists don’t have a sense of humour.

I’m not on the payroll of Big Media, Big Pharma, Big Quacka or Big Womba.

My email address is nellietag and the provider is googlemail.

Notes

(a) One phrase for this is medical pluralism which seems a little odd as it equates the value of the sources. Eg, Medical pluralism among American women: results of a national survey. At least for the US, the authors conclude: “Medical pluralism is common among women and should be accepted as a cultural norm”.
Apparently, the higher the level of education, the more women are likely to use CAM (after adjusting for other confounders (at least for the US. There are probably figures for the UK that I shall come across): Socioeconomic factors and women’s use of complementary and alternative medicine in four racial/ethnic groups.

I assume that Rose Shapiro has some primary sources for these assertions in her book: Suckers: How alternative medicine makes fools of us all. (I will replace this when I read her book and check the references.)

According to Shapiro, the most likely users of CAM are middle-aged, middle-class, educated women aged 35 to 55 with a high disposable income.

“As many as 47 per cent of middle-aged mothers in the UK in the top of the tree in socioeconomic terms say they have used CAM at least once,” she writes.

“About half the population of European countries like France, Belgium, Germany and Denmark have used CAM and in Australia, America and Canada up to 70 per cent of the population does so.”