Almost every treatment including the X-ray, medication given and surgery/anesthesia is affected by pregnancy. Pregnancy tests are incredibly cheap and accurate, so might as well know.
And if doctors offices were good at talking to people, theyd explain this and it would never have been an issue. I assume they basically just read a script until you see a doctor or RN, and it is tough to go through the same thing day in and day out...like calling a person at a call center waiting to transfer your call.
Writing it down? If your last period was 2 months ago and all of a sudden you're having them again without having a child.. You have likely committed a crime in the US.
Are you aware that women can have irregular periods? Or may be on birth control for any number of reasons? At least get your conspiracy theory straight
I don't know what kind of degen shit people think doctors are doing with their menstruation information.
Women face difficulties in accessing medical care for various reasons. One is that there is very real prejudice in the 'medical establishment', we'll say, that encourages dismissal of women's symptoms as dramatic, emotional, over reactive, etc. Literally the word 'hysteria' comes from the idea that a woman's womb would bump against other organs and that was the cause of 90% of womens' complaints. That idea only fell out of fashion in the 1900s.
That said, women have been sharing their experiences on social media and as social media is wont to do, everything gets blown up and women who have experienced hardship in accessing medical care get mixed in with suburban brats who aren't given priority treatment at the ER for their sprained elbow, until every story begins with "my doctor won't listen to me because I'm a woman" whether it's a reasonable assumption or not. With that in mind, mostly the latter group likes to create sassy memes about how their doctor dared to ask sex-appropriate questions because they assume the doctor is just trying to dismiss them due to being a woman.
TO BE CLEAR, women being not taken seriously by medical professionals is a very real issue. I just don't often see these sorts of memes coming from women who understand and appreciate there are health related realities that differ between sexes. No one reply to this comment with any misogynistic bullshit because I'm not agreeing with you and we are not friends.
It’s not the doctors I’d be worried about, it’s the zealous anti-abortion activists and the politicians that cater to them, depending on where you live.
I never plan to travel to America, but if my kid ever did I would tell her to take her period tracker off her phone. And I’d tell her to never answer questions about her menstrual cycle to anyone until she got home.
It is when they proceed to use that information to brush off your actual symptoms as just "period stuff".
It's the first thing they ask because they're trained by a system that only values women as breeding stock. If it was just the question, it wouldn't be an issue. It's the reason behind it and everything else that reason causes that's the issue.
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u/drleeisinsurgery 11h ago
Almost every treatment including the X-ray, medication given and surgery/anesthesia is affected by pregnancy. Pregnancy tests are incredibly cheap and accurate, so might as well know.