The Lady's Handbook For Her Mysterious Illness: A Memoir by Sarah Ramey
☀️☀️☀️☀️

With statistics like 75% of all autoimmune patients being female, it's no wonder that I found this book in equal parts fascinating, elucidating, and horrific. 

Ramey spends approximately half of the book detailing her harrowing, drawn out experience trying to seek help for her mysterious illness. This takes place over more than a decade through both Western and alternative medicine systems, and the tales she shares within are nothing short of depressing. The lack of care, understanding and support for people with chronic illness is a blight on society.

The second half I found less effective or appropriate: the tangent on gender was interesting and made some good points but ultimately left me feeling a bit icky with the assuredness she assigns certain characteristics to each gender, ignoring the obvious fact that these too are socially applied and not inherently built into us. I was also not impressed by her claim that those outside of Western countries have less troubles due to diet etc, which is patently untrue. She does, to an extent, acknowledge her unbelievable privilege as a white woman with access to money to make her prescribed changes - changes that a significant amount of her readership would struggle to achieve - but I wished she did more here.

Ultimately though, for all of my criticisms, I think this is a very important book tackling very important issues that should be read, at least in part, by a wider readership than simply women who might have a mysterious illness. I identified multiple people in my life who live under this category and also myself suffer some mild issues within this realm, so it was beneficial to see this sort of information all laid out like this.