In Feb 2021, I opened a txt document and wrote:

‘Thinking about why I haven’t been writing my week notes - some weeks there is nothing interesting to write, I am either learning stats skills, the mechanical ones rather than the theoretical ones, and those are not much fun to write about. And sometimes probably the thoughts are just slow cooking and taking their sweet time. I’ve also been a bit dispersed trying to finish a project, start a new one and at the same time think about how to shape this PhD proposal. The original idea seems a bit dusty now (women, pain and inflammation), and I sort or resist the zoning into it in fear of that ‘specialisation’ that feels like a ‘narrowing’, when I strongly believe that issues like chronic pain are not narrow but connected, and need many fields, approaches, similitudes etc.’

Which led to about 6 months of digital silence, of the productive sort. As well as polishing numbers and wrapping up my second project, I had time to think again about those feelings of discomfort around quantitative secondary data, and what I was missing most when thinking about medically unexplained phenomena - like chronic pain. Because they’re medically unexplained doesn’t mean they’re unexplainable. So same day in Feb 2021, I wrote:

‘It’s been a good weekend where I sat on my new armchair and sunk into a book. It’s a kind of collective biography of Franz Boas and the (mostly female) anthropologists that shaped the field of cultural anthropology. I have been thinking more and more about anthropology during the past weeks, since I yearn for the narratives and the exploration that it entails, the ground zero of grounded theory approaches, the pure listening. But there is no such thing as pure listening. Reading about Boas et al, I was surprised (or reminded) about their approach to theory and data. Boas was active at the time of eugenics, and the nature=culture period. The research of people like Powell was conducted in such a way to validate a hypothesis that had been made a priori, not even a hypothesis to be honest: a full fledged racist theory. Data was collected by Powell and gang to fill in the gaps and prove a point - inductive approach. Boas on the other hand was more interested in collecting data and deriving a theory from that - which led to the theory of cultural relativity, where each culture sees another from a presupposed vantage-point, and is blind to its own inconsistencies. Deductive approach, all the way. This reading came at a time when I had gotten myself into a rut, after months working with longitudinal databases where data has been collected by others, over the years, in who knows what ways, and there is never a recognisable person behind the datapoint. Because of how the data is arranged and what is collected, some questions can be asked, while others can not. This surely produces an unwanted inheritance of questions/possibilities that is not so progressive or enlightened as we might think. The data goes to shape the theory, but the data is partial and tainted, so what to do? I’d come to the conclusion that one should then always start from a theory, that to ask an intelligent question one should have processed the work and theories of others to come up with one that was worthy to test and then make the data work for it. Part of my conclusion resolved in the necessity to combine quantitative data, the numbers, no matter what their type (biological, social etc) with personal narratives - in order to provide context to the numbers, not just by other additional numbers, but by testimony. By inserting the voice. It feels almost as strong as an essential right for the researcher to listen to and include the voices of the researched, be they mad, sad, complaining, time-consuming or other. They are real, they may speak lies or overinflated partial truths but if we are at a stage in which the theories will be dictated by my individual academic parkour and the data has its own set of prejudices inbuilt in its collection methods, then perhaps the only thing we can do to excuse these attempts we call science is to get the researched to participate. At least research won’t be inflicted but it will have been done together.’

Basically, I invented mixed methods research : ) I know this is already the case in citizen science, patient and public involvement programmes etc, but it kind of had to come from my belly. Backwards I am sure: we do not like to discover what we don’t already know, but it helps me to grow with the process - in the same way in which science(s) and children grow through repetition and minor adjustments.

So I found myself two supervisors, an epidemiologist and an anthropologist who will be sitting tight with me for the next few years as I try to understand this thing about women and pain. And suffering. Because it’s important, and I suspect there is something that these achey bodies are trying to tell us about the world.

End of week, end of week note. Which is more of a whenever note, because time doesn’t function on schedule.

Fern test - Wikipedia

Above, pic of a positive fern test - basically, crystallised vaginal discharge. You’re welcome!