Biography
Estelle Carde holds degrees in social sciences (sociology and anthropology) and medicine (specializing in public health). She is a professor of sociology at the Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on social inequalities in health. She co-directs the health inequalities axis of the CREMIS (Montreal Research Centre on Social Inequalities, Discrimination and Alternative Citizenship Practices). In the field of chronic pain, she is particularly interested in the social inequalities in the credibility of people who report living with pain.
Why did you choose to study pain management?
Chronic pain is a fascinating subject of study for me as a sociologist. Like any other illness, it is, in fact, a social phenomenon: its causes (including the chronicity of acute pain), its consequences (physical, mental, and social), and even the experience of it (particularly through the care to which one has access, but also simply the feeling of being believed when one complains of pain) are shaped by life in society.
It is therefore also permeated by social inequalities (socioeconomic, gender-based, racial, etc.) that I believe it is important, in the name of social justice, to highlight and analyze.
Finally, from my medical studies, I have retained an interest in the pathophysiological understanding of diseases and in strategies aimed at preventing and alleviating them. However, pain poses a particular challenge in this regard: its eminently subjective nature challenges the biomedical model more explicitly than other common diseases do. Unraveling the biological embodiment of social factors—of which chronic pain is a product—thus offers a fascinating test of the biopsychosocial model.
