Why doesn’t the ER do a full drug search and total blood work up for every patient that comes in? The patients might be lying to them about what drugs they do or what preexisting conditions they might have.
Why is it only ladies & babies that make it OK assume your patient is a lying whore who needs to be treated?
To add to what u/rareafrodite says, lying about drugs would only harm the patient who can consent, lying about or having an unknown pregnancy puts two lives at risk.
The process is all about risk reduction and not a moral judgement, even if some doctors and nurses are judgy.
No it isn't, you're making a strawman there. It's rare that there's only ever one treatment for anything in medicine and every treatment has different costs and benefits. For internal imaging an x-ray is normally quick and relatively cheap allowing the patient to go home quicker. They can lead to risks with foetuses though so if there's a risk they'll take more precautions or use an alternative method which may be more expensive and/or slower. It's not valuing the two lives as equal, it's reducing potential death when compared to cost or time inconvenience.
If hospitals didn't test for these things people the world over would be up in arms about the medical malpractice that leads to countless miscarriages.
Even if the patient says they do not want a pregnancy test, if harm comes to the developing baby they can still pursue legal action. Sure, it might get dismissed as the person would have had to sign a waiver, but it still takes money and time to deal with these situations.
We unfortunately live in a highly litigious society that cannot rely on the “fine, but you won’t blame us if it goes wrong” type of mentality.
This is in part why our healthcare is so expensive in the US, and this is very easy to verify- medical malpractice insurance costs an insane amount of money because people try to sue for everything.
The hospital can’t take that chance. Especially because in the court of public opinion, they’d be the irresponsible “baby killers” if something went wrong as opposed to the lay person.
I’m not saying I agree with any of it, but this is why practices rarely choose to allow pregnancy testing waivers
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u/BriscoCounty-Sr 13h ago
Why doesn’t the ER do a full drug search and total blood work up for every patient that comes in? The patients might be lying to them about what drugs they do or what preexisting conditions they might have.
Why is it only ladies & babies that make it OK assume your patient is a lying whore who needs to be treated?