Welcome to Emails from Maya Dusenbery!

Here’s a bit about what you can expect in your inbox.

Hi!

I’m Maya Dusenbery. I’m a journalist, editor, and author of Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick.

You can sign up for my newsletter here:

I plan to send out this newsletter every two weeks or so. In each email, I’ll share what I’ve been up to lately—recent articles I’ve written, interviews I’ve done, and upcoming IRL events.

The Latest in Doing Harm

In The Latest in Doing Harm section, I’ll share some recent links—studies, media articles, podcasts, films, and books—about women’s health and gender bias in medicine. Before my book, Doing Harm, came out in 2018, I connected with several authors and filmmakers who were exploring women’s experiences with illness and medicine in their own recent or forthcoming projects. It was reassuring to know that none of us would be a lone voice in the wilderness saying there’s a huge problem here.

In the year and half since, the problem has gotten much more attention. Gender bias in medicine has been covered by many major media outlets—from The Today Show to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Every season, it seems like there’s a new batch of books detailing the myriad ways women are being failed by medicine. As a recent essay reflecting on this wave concluded, “It feels like the beginning of a reckoning.”

Doing Harm has been fairly criticized for being a bit skimpy when it comes to offering possible solutions. So in addition to documenting the ongoing efforts to draw attention to the problem, I’ll try to highlight the ways that people are working—from both outside and within the profession—to fix it.

(Feel free to email me with tips.)

How to Be Well

Apart from women’s health and medical bias, many of my current interests could be described as revolving around wellness. Not wellness in the way the term is so often used—as though it were synonymous with the wellness industry. More along the lines of the World Health Organization’s definition of health: “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

In the media, the pursuit of wellness is often treated with ironic distance, if not outright ridicule. But I think we all earnestly want to be well—in our bodies, minds, and communities. And the fact that wellness has become such a cultural obsession—and, yes, multi-billion dollar industry—is a reflection of the enormous barriers to reaching such a state these days.

In the How to Be Well section, I’ll share some recent links exploring questions like: What is preventing us—as individuals and a society—from being well? How do the ways we live and eat and sleep and move and work undermine our well-being? How are we trying to self-care or bio-hack or opt-out our way toward wellness? And how could we imagine other, more collective ways to get there?

Bookend

Finally, in the Bookend section (get it?), I’ll share a book I’m currently reading. In part, that’s to help hold myself accountable. For a while there, I mostly read the internet. But since writing one of my own, I’ve had a new appreciation for the depth and nuance books can achieve (as well as the staggering amount of work they require). I’m trying to be diligent about closing my laptop and reading for at least half an hour before bed.

A note on subscriptions

Finally, a note on subscriptions: these emails are free—and always will be. However, in the future, I may turn on the option for paid subscriptions or experiment with other ways you could support my work if you’ve got some money to spare.