Hope you are feeling much better.

Second the boo. xx.

I have had a female doctors deny me what I needed, but she at least felt guilty about it Her (patriarchal) training required what I was unwilling to give, so we parted ways. She knew it was a difference in place rather than me just being crazy, so it wasn’t like a male doctor.

thanks for sharing your experiences. I hope vulnerable women learn that authority man is a threat. Love that expression “authority man” Can I steal it, if I cite you.

For what little it’s worth, I have distrusted the entire medical establishment since I was treated like SHIT during an extended intestinal illness. I have always been struck by this statement from “Howards End” by EM Forster: “The sick had no rights; they were beyond the pale; one could lie to them remorselessly.”

I wrote a big-ass paper on how badly the medical establishment treats sick people–especially sick women–and collected statements like this:

in contemporary America there is an assumption among physicians that the diseased and the beautiful cannot be encapsulated in one and the same category. Young physicians often see beautiful patients as exemplary or “good” patients, patients who will follow doctor’s orders and therefore will regain health. The aged or poor patient, on the other hand, is seen, even by the trained physician, as one who is a “bad” patient, a patient who will probably “make trouble” and whose health will not improve. Indeed “lower-class” patients were often diagnosed as being more gravely ill and were given poorer prognoses than those of other social classes when, in fact, they differed from those patients only in terms of the visible (or stated) criteria of class. –Sander L Gilman, “Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS”

and

there is clear evidence that behavior and occurrences that both we and medieval people see as “illnesses” are less likely to be described as something “to be cured” when they happen to women than when they happen to men. Women’s illness was “to be endured,” not “cured.” Patient suffering of disease or injury was a major way of gaining sanctity for females but not for males. –Caroline Walker Bynum, “Holy Feast, Holy Fast.”

The fact that the medical establishment feels, by and large, so justified in distrusting women and blaming them for their own suffering is one reason I can’t watch “House”–that doctor’s sneering disdain for people so ICKY as to get sick and so self-obsessed to consider their pain IMPORTANT to someone like a DOCTOR makes me pretty damn sick. Likewise, I also can’t watch “Grey’s Anatomy.” The way illness is made this backdrop for all this posturing by these doctors is more than I can stomach. I absolutely do not understand the popularity of either show, and wonder how many among the audience for either have been hospitalized for any length of time. I’m sure there are some, but everyone I know who has spent much time as a patient in hospitals can’t stand either show.

I really, really hope you get well and don’t have to deal with pricks like that old goat again.

What a fucker.