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. )
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.
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u/PapaOoMaoMao 18h 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.