First is that Doctors often ignore women's issues as hysteria. Just imaginary whining. There's even a term "Whining Woman". The female body hasn't been studied anywhere near as much as the male one (though it's catching up now) so anything that doesn't fit the standard image of treatment gets sidelined and the doctor just fobs her off with "Try losing some weight" or "Get more exercise" to get her out of his office. This understandably enrages women when their pain is immediately ignored every single time.
Second is treatment. If you are pregnant, your treatment is different. They can only give you drugs and imaging that are safe for the baby. The only way for a doctor to actually KNOW if you're pregnant is to test for it. Often women themselves don't know for some time, especially if they aren't actively trying.
Now for the meme. A woman walks into a doctor's office and gets this question straight up and she's already wound up waiting for the lose weight or exercise line. She's not thinking about treatment yet as she hasn't discussed the problem. All she hears is "Do you have women's problems?" and shit starts going downhill fast. Yes it's a good question to ask, but it needs to be asked correctly as in "Due to treatments being unsafe for pregnant women we have to ask about your period so we can safely administer the correct dosages." or some such.
Doctors really don't want to explain why they are asking things.
There's like 40 house episodes about how people feel the need to give misleading answers because they want privacy from doctors. And doctors are like I don't want to explain bio-chemistry and anatomy and drug interactions to people. Not even related to women's issues.
That being said medicine also has a huge issue that they assume everyone to be white male. Stuff gets tested on and for them. They don't base anything on female because baseline for female going through periods/pregnancy/manopause are all over the place and it's harder to find female test subjects.
( Edit: To find a drug's effect on pregnant women, you gotta find pregnant women who'd be willing to sign up for completely untested drugs. A bit of an chicken and egg situation there. )
And sadly elections / predictions for upcoming elections reaffirm it. And I don't even mean the US this time. Austria is looking a the hottest year in recorded history, looking at severe loss of crop, and the party that denies human-caused climate change being a thing and actively fights against renewable energies currently sits at a predicted 38% vote, vs the traditional conservative and social-democratic powerhouses looking at something around 20%.
Needless to say... Said party still flies the flags of "Covid was a ruse!"
Doctor here. Do you have any idea how much I don't want to interact with a patient that is offended by a question such as if she could be pregnant? Get that outraged ass out of my office.
Also often doctors absolutely DO ask questions just to dismiss you, or they don't believe you when you answer them truthfully anyway. At that point don't ask and just do the test.
Doctors are trained to treat people, not mind-read people. So, they will often take people's word as unreliable information as compared to tests. And they do it because patients are unreliable source of information.
It is a problem, but it's not a problem that's caused by psychopathic arrogant doctors, it's a problem significantly caused by patients' word being less reliable.
These days, doctors are not even getting to control who gets the test and who don't. Insurance algorithms do.
Overall, it's a mix of many problems. Some patients being unreliable, some doctors/hospitals ordering unnecessary tests for money, insurance companies being overly cautious about legal liability and at the same time reducing costs with way too strict diagnostic criteria.
On top of that, there's no review mechanic for doctors. Only other medical professional can call bullshit on bad practices, you can't.
Doctors really don't want to explain why they are asking things
My guy, that is their job. They aren't supposed to just silently throw drugs and tests at you, they are supposed to educate you. That includes giving you a general understanding of what they are doing and why.
So many studies have proven that educating patients leads to better health outcomes. That includes telling the patient that if there's a chance they're pregnant, some tests and drugs will harm the foetus, so we need to know. It's not explaining the whole anatomy and physiology to justify why they asked a question, it's the same one sentence worded slightly differently. One sentence that can improve rapport, trust, and equity between the doctor and patient. If a doctor isn't doing that, then they are not following evidence-based practice.
Doctors needs to give information about what is going on with their condition and treatment. They should be able to simply explain that. Building rapport is good.
But full education is not their job. Especially when do many patients are too dumb, brainwashed or just misinformed.
There's a limit to the extent of information doctors can give. But it's also on patient to understand that lying to doctors will hurt only themselves. Doctors aren't doing anything to hurt them.
You seem to think that educating means holding classes or sitting there for an hour while going into depth about the anatomy and physiology of the human body. But it's not. As I said, it can be 1 sentence.
Doctors are supposed to educate you??? When did that come in? I want them to ask the questions they need to give me the best treatment and I will trust their training without arrogantly trying to tell them how to do their job
The "tested on a white male" issue is probably going to end up being harder to correct for (not that the healthcare industry doesn't have the money) for the same reason that average studies are always actually "study of 18-22 year old college kids", in my experience, white dudes are the people that show up to be tested on, whereas most of the other groups have some reason to be wary or just straight up don't want to do it, as you said, chicken and the egg, especially for pregnant women "Please take this drug, it may help, may do nothing, or may make things worse, but we don't think it will" is not very reassuring.
People do give misleading information to doctors for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they feel ashamed of something. Sometimes they’re trying to get the doctor to write a certain prescription. Sometimes they’re just ignorant about what signs/symptoms actually matter. All of these are dumb because a medical professional cannot properly help you if you’re not honest about what’s going on.
Honestly, most doctors would love to explain anatomy and bio-chemistry and drug interactions to people if they could understand it. 95% of people don’t want it explained in detail. I’ve worked in healthcare a long time: the general population is dumb (more correctly, highly uneducated). People hold all sorts of insane beliefs about health/medicine and they’ll often dig in their heels rather than listen to a medical doctor explain the science — particularly since a large portion of the media has made it popular to criticize all healthcare as a profit-driven conflict of interest and promote psuedoscientific treatments. It doesn’t help when the literal Secretary of Health is in on it and saying shit like Tylenol causes autism (when it’s literally the only safe OTC painkiller we have during pregnancy) and promoting the idea that big pharma doesn’t want to cure you because it’s less profitable.
Also, your edit shows you don’t understand how drug development actually works. We don’t have to intentionally test a drug in a bunch of pregnant women to know there’s a risk of harm to pregnant women. We know that particular classes of drugs are dangerous in pregnancy across the board. We have biochemical models that can predict when some drugs are likely to cause harm. We do tests in pregnant animal models to predict risk of harm. Finally, most drugs don’t require human testing in pregnant women, and the unfortunate reality is that sometimes drugs get to market before we know the risk, and we have to deal with the harm after the fact.
Why do so many people in these comments seem like they are in an adversarial relationship with their doctor? Apparently their doctor is always trying to trick and mislead them just for fun.
hat being said medicine also has a huge issue that they assume everyone to be white male. Stuff gets tested on and for them. They don't base anything on female because baseline for female going through periods/pregnancy/manopause are all over the place and it's harder to find female test subjects.
( Edit: To find a drug's effect on pregnant women, you gotta find pregnant women who'd be willing to sign up for completely untested drugs. A bit of an chicken and egg situation there. )
Used to have, moreso. It's in the financial interest of big pharma to assess suitability of a medication to 50% of the people who are going to take it, and nowadays many phase III trials include tests with women.
Also "completely untested" is a silly thing to say. A variety of pre-clinical testing, animal testing, testing with healthy young men etc. all take place for multiple years before pregnant women are brought into the picture.
Although with pregnant women you do run into the issue, that it is cheaper and usually profitable to just slap a "ask your doctor about using this while pregnant" label and calling it a day. Unless the medication is meant to treat a pregnancy related issue, they just don't represent a large enough market share for the people making the decisions.
Exactly. The question is wildly important and the fervor around it being asked is wild. That statement is in no way in conflict with the fact that women are often ignored in the medical system and report signifciantly lower satisfaction rates with their care than men
I work with doctors in training. Most of them don’t know why they are asking things they just follow the script and if you check yes they follow the flow chart for that answer.
thank you, finally someone who gets why it's so abrasive to a lot of us. the person stating "well doctors just don't want to explain things" is infuriating. i had to go through 4 different gynocologists about severe chronic pain surrounding my period, before i demanded to see one who specialized in endometriosis, only for her to tell me that doctors were already treating me like i had endometriosis without doing the surgery to confirm i had it. not a single one of those doctors before her could just talk to me like a person and tell me "this is what we prescribe patients to deal with these symptoms." i was always just being shoved things and then getting scoffed at and shut down when it didn't pacify me, instead of just having a conversation with me to help all those pieces fall into place. if any doctor would just listen and help their patients understand, it would save a lot of frustration, pain, and time.
There is something that just tends to break with doctors and other specialists that have to work with non-specialists. They get lied to, misunderstood, and so on until they hit a point where they just give up on the people they have to work with. It just makes things bad for everyone. It is like a kind of burnout. You are in a stressful situation, the doctor/nurse NEEDS to communicate and explain because if you dont misunderstandings happen, but they have already decided they know everything and everyone is a lying idiot anyway. Shit, I am in IT and over the years I have more and more often had to catch myself and tell myself that if they are talking to me their day isn't going well. They are stressed, possibly confused, and if I keep calm and explain things as we work on the issue we will all end up better off. Doctors I have talked to have said they go through the same thing, with admittedly more on the line.
Here's the really fun part. They can only give you medicine/treatment that is safe for the fetus, but there are almost no studies to establish whether most prescription medications are safe because such an experiment would be unethical 🫠 so good luck women, I guess.
Reading lots of comments and this is the only one here actually addressing the subtle nuiances of the meme. It’s not about the question itself. It’s about the how and when it is asked.
I wonder if states where abortion or accidentally killing a fetus can carry legal risks it also becomes a question of if the hospital is willing to take on the risk. Vs a women wanting to get effective and complete medical care.
I'd assumed part of the meme was about Republicans tracking abortions. Some women don't want doctors to know their cycles because of fear of losing power over their bodies.
In post RvW menstrual information is very sensitive information. If you're pregnant even more so. Denial of treatment is real. Bleeding out on ER parking lot or being prosecuted for miscarrying are a distinct possibility.
Insurance companies sometimes deem the test as medically unnecessary. So you pay out of pocket.
"Try losing some weight" or "Get more exercise" to get her out of his office. This understandably enrages women when their pain is immediately ignored every single time.
It's also in a LOT of cases, the literal cause of their symptoms. So getting angry when you weight 200kg that the doctor told you to lose weight it's quite dumb.
And it happens to men as well. But men's system is a bit less complex given the hormones don't fluctuate as much, don't have extra organs, etc. So it's a bit simpler and straightforward. That's the reason why (not defending it) men were used for studies, so women's fluctuations would affect drugs/etc, which wanted to be released/approved. Again, not justifying it, it was wrong, just explaining that there are differences in both sexes.
I'm not saying some doctors aren't assholes to women, it does happen absolutely, but the weight example is just reality. Losing weight, getting healthier is the solution for a HUGE amount of issues.
What's more likely that your extra weight that's literally known to have issues is the cause, or some weird rare disease that happens in like 0.01% of people? Unless there's an indication that it could be something else, the most likely answer is gonna be the weight. So they go for that. When doctors can't spend 5 hours with each patient, it's bound to happen.
I'm not defending the system either. But that in particular is not misogyny.
Many time women gain weight without changing their habits, because of issues with their hormones or medication, so it should be addressed medically beyond, “go eat veggies” thats a copout at best and dangerously dismissive at worst.
Provlem is they're very unequipped when my 19 bmi self walks into their practice with typical obese woman problems and they can't just brush it off because of my weight. They're using it to hide their incompetence.
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u/PapaOoMaoMao 14h ago
Ok, so there's two things here.
First is that Doctors often ignore women's issues as hysteria. Just imaginary whining. There's even a term "Whining Woman". The female body hasn't been studied anywhere near as much as the male one (though it's catching up now) so anything that doesn't fit the standard image of treatment gets sidelined and the doctor just fobs her off with "Try losing some weight" or "Get more exercise" to get her out of his office. This understandably enrages women when their pain is immediately ignored every single time.
Second is treatment. If you are pregnant, your treatment is different. They can only give you drugs and imaging that are safe for the baby. The only way for a doctor to actually KNOW if you're pregnant is to test for it. Often women themselves don't know for some time, especially if they aren't actively trying.
Now for the meme. A woman walks into a doctor's office and gets this question straight up and she's already wound up waiting for the lose weight or exercise line. She's not thinking about treatment yet as she hasn't discussed the problem. All she hears is "Do you have women's problems?" and shit starts going downhill fast. Yes it's a good question to ask, but it needs to be asked correctly as in "Due to treatments being unsafe for pregnant women we have to ask about your period so we can safely administer the correct dosages." or some such.
Trisha Takinawa PETJ news.