I’ve been told it ranges from “it’s a quick pinch”, through “that’s just the way it is” to “we could give a numbing shot, but it would be just as uncomfortable and make this take longer so there’s no point”.
As a man looking in from the outside, women’s reproductive healthcare has a level of dismissiveness around pain that makes the dumbest machismo look quaint. There’s the male doctors who just dismiss women’s pain, and the female doctors who know and just “that’s how it is” it. And then the one 50 year old obstetrics doctor in the country who understands the balance of “childbirth intrinsically hurts” and “we can manage the hell out of pain if we actually do our jobs” who gets to enter a room for 30 seconds, implicitly convey that they’re a saint and perfect human being and then immediately get paged to perform emergency surgery for a car accident involving multiple pregnant women, at least in our experience.
That last bit is the only exaggeration. I’m sure there’s actually two or three doctors like her per state. The rest is true.
Dismissiveness towards women’s pain is upsettingly common in healthcare. From plain old sexism (a woman’s 7/10 is a mans 4/10 because women are sensitive) to women’s symptoms manifesting differently than men’s (women’s heart attacks don’t present the same as men’s, and differences in abdominal anatomy means there’s more ways for pain to mask itself as coming from somewhere else.), the end result is that I can’t think of a women I know and have talked to about it who hasn’t laughingly referenced a doctor dismissing their pain and ordering a pregnancy test.
I’ve been told it ranges from “it’s a quick pinch”, through “that’s just the way it is” to “we could give a numbing shot, but it would be just as uncomfortable and make this take longer so there’s no point”.
As a man looking in from the outside, women’s reproductive healthcare has a level of dismissiveness around pain that makes the dumbest machismo look quaint. There’s the male doctors who just dismiss women’s pain, and the female doctors who know and just “that’s how it is” it. And then the one 50 year old obstetrics doctor in the country who understands the balance of “childbirth intrinsically hurts” and “we can manage the hell out of pain if we actually do our jobs” who gets to enter a room for 30 seconds, implicitly convey that they’re a saint and perfect human being and then immediately get paged to perform emergency surgery for a car accident involving multiple pregnant women, at least in our experience.
That last bit is the only exaggeration. I’m sure there’s actually two or three doctors like her per state. The rest is true.
Dismissiveness towards women’s pain is upsettingly common in healthcare. From plain old sexism (a woman’s 7/10 is a mans 4/10 because women are sensitive) to women’s symptoms manifesting differently than men’s (women’s heart attacks don’t present the same as men’s, and differences in abdominal anatomy means there’s more ways for pain to mask itself as coming from somewhere else.), the end result is that I can’t think of a women I know and have talked to about it who hasn’t laughingly referenced a doctor dismissing their pain and ordering a pregnancy test.