Many doctors dismiss a significant amount of pain complaints in general because of the small minority of drug abusers seeking pain meds.

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.

Lololol no, you're just told to take an ibuprofen

My gf got told "it's a pinch" and "there are no nerves in the cervix you won't feel it".

They stab that shit with sharp pincers to hold it open. Ohhh it hurts.

My doctor told me to take a couple ibuprofens before. Did the thing. Made me lie there for a few minutes then set me loose.

I vomited in the parking lot afterwards.

It's not, AND these are "guidelines", which will amount to nothing.

Hell it doesn't even need to be about lady bits for doctors to be dismissive. My wife has been through 3 GP's trying to get some hip pain looked at. Finally found one that would at least do imaging, but they just kinda shrugged it off while she can't even go foot over foot up/down steps.

She finally said screw it and went right to a PT. They had it 50% better two sessions later.

The real kicker? The GP's who both blew her off were women.

You want to get angry with a group of people?

Do a group read of Invisible Women, it’ll fuck you up how badly science and engineering fucks up rather than include women because it’s hard 😬

Fun fact: they stopped working on a male birth control pill because of the side effects it was causing. Most of those side effects are experienced by women taking the female birth control pill.

It's a bit unethical to continue a study when it causes people to try and committ suicide.

Few medical doctors have been as lauded—and loathed—as James Marion Sims.

Credited as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims developed pioneering tools and surgical techniques related to women’s reproductive health. In 1876, he was named president of the American Medical Association, and in 1880, he became president of the American Gynecological Society, an organization he helped found. The 19th-century physician has been lionized with a half-dozen statues around the country.

But because Sims’ research was conducted on enslaved Black women without anesthesia, medical ethicists, historians and others say his use of enslaved Black bodies as medical test subjects falls into a long, ethically bereft history that includes the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Henrietta Lacks. Critics say Sims cared more about the experiments than in providing therapeutic treatment, and that he caused untold suffering by operating under the racist notion that Black people did not feel pain.

[…]

In the 1850s, Sims moved to New York and opened the first-ever Woman’s Hospital, where he continued testing controversial medical treatments on his patients. When any of Sims’s patients died, the blame, according to him, lay squarely with “the sloth and ignorance of their mothers and the Black midwives who attended them.” He did not believe anything was wrong with his methods.

As much as this sucks, it's not just birth control. Medication that was legalized when laws and regulations were more lax will stay legal even if wouldn't be permitted nowadays. Famously, aspirin would almost certainly not be legalized today because the necessary dose is too close to the dangerous dose. Of course it's sexist as shit that they're only starting to researching male birth control in the current day.

IUDs are a pretty terrible experience for many women. My uterus wouldn’t stop trying to reject mine for two years. These don’t work at all for a lot of women.

That’s extreme. If doctors don’t care then why did they become doctors? Why go through all of medical school and residency with years of lost sleep and exhaustion to become a doctor? Why not become a lawyer instead? High end corporate lawyers make far more money than even the highest paid doctors.

fucking removed

What?..?