Our guest speaker Dr Diane O'Leary is a philosopher and bioethicist, currently a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at University of Pittsburgh.
Her work focuses on mind-body issues in medicine, with special attention to confusion about dualism in diagnosis. Misunderstanding about dualism has made it difficult for many patients to access safe, ethical care, particularly those with ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and chronic Lyme disease.
One of the most impactful areas of Dr. O’Leary’s work is the effort to show how medicine relies on mind-body confusions to support outdated social ideas about women. Women's bodily symptoms are attributed to psychological causes ten times more often than men’s, and women struggle to access healthcare readily available to men. To secure health equity for women, Dr. O’Leary supports eliminating gender as a factor in psychosomatic diagnosis.
