The Washington Post: How American health care has been failing women for centuries (review of a book written by Jennifer Lunden)

Reading the opening chapter of Jennifer Lunden’s “American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life,” I recognized myself: a college student beset with debilitating fatigue and diagnosed with mononucleosis that was supposed to resolve in a couple of weeks but didn’t. My illness got a name, chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), in 1988 just as I graduated college a year late. Lunden fell ill with the same condition, myalgic encephalomyelitis, the following year. Though diagnosed and named, this illness and its symptoms, along with a host of enigmatic disorders that disproportionately afflict women, were often dismissed as depression and laziness.

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Along with the book’s rigorous cultural critique, Lunden draws from on her own experience with CFS, including the range of treatments she has tried with varying success. Diet, hyperbaric oxygen, functional medicine that “takes a holistic approach to the complexity and interconnectedness of biological systems,” and GoFundMe (because of her medical costs) all play important roles in her recovery and the book’s scrutiny of health-care systems and practices. She describes a type of brain re-training as especially effective for her that seemed reminiscent of physical therapy for balance that I have done to treat vertigo. The interplay between the author’s efforts with her own ailments and the chronicling of our nation’s shortcomings delivers the cumulative power of this book.​

Full article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/05/02/american-breakdown-review-jennifer-lunden/