"The pain is not real, it's feki": Recognizing pain, gender, and structural inequalities in a Tanzanian hospital.

Authors

Megan D Cogburn, Emma Hanley, Jacob Roman, Adrienne E Strong

Published in

Medical anthropology quarterly. Pages e70095. Sep 07, 2026. Epub Sep 07, 2026.

Abstract

Pain always begs a response, yet biomedical providers everywhere struggle with how to know and respond to pain. Based on collaborative ethnographic work in a Tanzanian hospital, we explore healthcare workers' sociocultural perceptions of pain and pain care practices to show how pain is recognized and distinguished in the busy clinical setting. Influenced by the socially productive nature and potential of fakes, we present the category of feki pain as a way healthcare workers negotiated care within a context of biomedical scarcity and sociocultural values that make it difficult to express and recognize pain of all kinds. The category of feki pain highlights both the difficulty that pain presents to low-resource healthcare systems and the possibility to recognize and respond to the structural nature of women's pain.

PMID:
42704845
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 08 Sep 2026.

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