Chronic Illness and the Wisdom of the Body
November 5, 2025
There is a type of illness that modern medicine struggles to comprehend. It hides from scans and slips through lab results. You look fine, sometimes even high-functioning, while every cell in your body works at a loss. The fatigue sinks into the bones, the pain cascades for reasons unknown, the heart races, and the brain fog erases the edges of thought. The body becomes unpredictable, both the vessel and the storm.
Women know this territory too well. Most of the conditions medicine calls “mysterious” — autoimmune disease, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, long COVID — are the ones that primarily affect women. We perform wellness. We stay productive and efficient even as our systems falter because that is what the world demands, sometimes outright and sometimes by omission. When the body finally refuses to comply, suspicion meets us at the door. Doctors deem it stress, anxiety, and burnout, thanks to the jaw-dropping gender bias in medicine. The implication is that if you can’t make your body behave, you must be doing something wrong. Chronic illness becomes a moral failure dressed up as a mystery.
