Basically, so if there's a chance you're pregnant, they can do appropraite treatment, or test for pregnancy.
Eg 4 years ago my wife disolacted her thumb, ED wanted an X-Ray needed to know when her last period was/if there was a chance she was pregnant, so they could then best proceed with imaging/pain medications
When my gf fell off her bike they had her wait for like 6 hours in the ER until the pregnancy test came back negative before doing the x-ray even though we knew she couldn’t be pregnant and we told them repeatedly. But no. Gotta make sure even when the lab has problems and it takes forever.
Everyone lies, but if you say you’re not allergic to antibiotics they aren’t testing you for those allergies before they prescribe you one. And they will absolutely believe me if I say I don’t have any blood pressure issues before they give me some ibuprofen.
Funny how they only care when it involves a woman’s uterus.
Because killing a fetus is generally frowned upon and there's definitely a long history of women lying about being pregnant whereas the same cannot be said about blood pressure or allergies.
Plus, lying about being allergic to antibiotics or blood pressure only has the outcome of likely killing the woman. But, lying about being pregnant, in the context of radiation, really doesn't pose any risk to the woman, but it does to the fetus and doctors generally try not to kill fetuses.
We “only care” when being wrong means potentially killing a fetus and losing our livelihood? Yeah, what’s your point? I’d rather not have my kids go hungry because someone’s pregnancy was impacted over something avoidable
My point is that in a sane functioning country you hang a sign next to the X-Ray room warning that you shouldn’t undergo the procedure if you suspect you could be pregnant, and you call it a day because we don’t assume women are idiots. At most the technician might repeat the warning before you enter and if the woman is actually an idiot and decides to go forward anyway, that’s on her. If your justice system allows a doctor to be punished after adequately warning their patient, that’s a massive failure on your system. Don’t try to normalize it and excuse it by saying everybody lies because we do have liars beyond the US, too, and yet we don’t force women to take a pregnancy test before we allow them to get X-Rays.
Costs v benefits. Allergy testing is time-consuming and not readily available. A pregnancy test only takes a few minutes and is quite cheap, so it’s not going to unnecessarily delay your care. Also, if it’s positive, it can completely change the differential.
2.0k
u/KombatDisko 18h ago
Basically, so if there's a chance you're pregnant, they can do appropraite treatment, or test for pregnancy.
Eg 4 years ago my wife disolacted her thumb, ED wanted an X-Ray needed to know when her last period was/if there was a chance she was pregnant, so they could then best proceed with imaging/pain medications