Had IUDs inserted twice in two different hospital systems in different states, but it was the same kind of awful both times.
Both times I was told to take ibuprofen beforehand, and that did absolutely nothing. But because it had been so bad the first time, with the second one I thought I’d be smart and took a vicodin I had from a prior procedure.
I still to lay in the room for 15 min after, trying not to vomit, and I nearly passed out. After , I walked to my car where I just sat there for 30 more min to rest. Even with vicodin it is the worst pain I have ever experienced in my life.
Not one ounce of sympathy or concern from anyone on staff.
It’s nice there are new guidelines, but I feel like it’s going to take more than that to make healthcare workers give a shit about this.
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This may just be a language barrier, but suffering is defined as pain or distress, either physical or mental, so that doesn’t make the distinction clear, I’m afraid.
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Let’s state the truth. Doctors do NOT care about women one bit, unless said woman is actively pregnant. And then it is ONLY to ensure the baby is ok. Otherwise I’ve yet to meet a doctor (male or female - doesn’t matter) who fines one damn about women.
ETA to add that doctors need to be told to give women pain relief is proof.
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.
It’s still money. But with the moral superiority too. “I’m a doctor”
But also, they’re saying that people don’t care about women. There’s an overwhelming amount of evidence for that. Have you SEEN the tool that’s used on the cervix for this procedure? It’s actually insane.
Upwards of 80% of OBGYNs are women. Saying that none of these women care about other women, that they went into a field that specializes in caring for women’s health without caring about women, is an extraordinary claim.
I think what we’re seeing here is not at all a lack of caring but a mismatch in expectations vs reality. Many women who receive an IUD report some of the worst pain they’ve felt in their entire life. At the same time, it is a routine outpatient procedure and a specialist doctor can perform thousands of IUD insertions over the course of her career. Do we expect this doctor to react with the same intensity and outpouring of empathy every single time? Or would it be more reasonable to expect that she’d get used to seeing her patients in pain and be numbed by the experience? Compassion fatigue is a real and extremely common phenomenon. Furthermore, I would expect that a doctor who is unduly influenced by the pain of their patients may be compromised in their ability to perform under pressure.
As for the procedure itself, my understanding is that the majority of the pain is not caused by the tools but by the cervix reflexively producing intense cramps in an effort to expel a foreign object: the IUD. There’s not a whole lot that can be done about that besides giving the patient some Midol and a day off work to rest.
Many women who receive an IUD report some of the worst pain they’ve felt in their entire life.
…
There’s not a whole lot that can be done about that besides giving the patient some Midol and a day off work to rest.
Erm…“oh you’re having the worst pain of your life, here have a combination muscle relaxant and acetaminophen mix that’s available over the counter. And also loose a days income”
I’m curious what a doctor taking the pain seriously would look like to you. Are you expecting something like a locally injected anesthetic or full in-patient sedation?
Either! Both would be better than throwing up from the pain, passing out, and then being sneered at for both.
Perhaps at least a prescription pain killer taken orally?
I would certainly support some sort of local, along the lines of what dentists use.
Do you know what actually causes the pain or is your understanding just an assumption?
I like how even in the article it calls out medical gaslighting.
I talked to a woman right after she had one inserted and that’s what she told me: intense cramps. I believe her. I’m not just spouting my opinion based on nothing.
If only science would study women as much as men, this procedure from the 1800s could be understood. It’s getting better for sure, at least you believed the one person who you talked to about it. You ever see the device they use to “pinch” and open the cervix? I could never. It’s called a tenaculum and looks like a torture device from the 1800s.
It’s well discussed and documented that medical science regularly ignores and brushes aside women, and is constantly several decades behind men’s science. So regardless of male or female obgyns or doctors, the scientific understanding SYSTEMICALLY of women’s issues AND women in general are more often brushed aside than not, so this push for actually doing something about the pain is a step in the right direction.
We already have rampant sexism, patriarchy, and male chauvinism in society as a whole - why would you believe academia and medical and scientific communities would be immune to those problems?
Science does ignore women a lot of the time but it’s not because they hate women. It’s because of medical ethics rules which make it a lot more expensive to include women in studies. You have to pay for pregnancy tests for women in the study and you have to do all kinds of corrections and extra analyses to make sure women’s menstrual cycles are not interfering with the data. Women who do get pregnant during the study need to be detected and removed from the study because any effects from the study that harm their baby can expose the researchers to enormous lawsuits.
So many studies, which don’t have a lot of money to begin with (we’re talking university studies run by grad students, not massive clinical trials run by big pharma) exclude women because it’s cheaper and easier and they get to run more studies as a result. The major exception to this are psychological studies that don’t carry the same risks, but these are usually run on the psychology students themselves (many of which are required to participate in them in order to receive course credits).
There’s not a whole lot that can be done about that besides giving the patient some Midol and a day off work to rest.
So just shrug and give a midol? Like we don’t have plenty of other effective, targeted pain relief that would 100% be given to a man who was going to be given an incredibly painful procedure? Especially if that procedure were routinely given to men.
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Lidocaine
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We actually don’t have much in the way of pain relief besides NSAIDs (of which Midol is one), local anesthesia (which I believe is not indicated for IUD insertion), and opioids (I’m sure you’ve heard of those in the news).
That’s some real great condescending language there. I think I can guess what’s between your legs lol. The CDC recommends lidocaine as a local anaesthetic. Themoreyouknow.jpg.
Private medicine is why people distrust doctors in America. They like to believe they are corrupt because of the costs and drug scandals.
I think its incompetance/negligence rather than malice here.
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Yeah, that opinion is rather over the top. You’re surely right when saying that doctors need to be more aware of issues that women might face, doctors should be more aware that female bodies work different and as such respond differently to medication, these are known issues
But to claim that they simply don’t care is simply not true. I’m sorry if you had bad experiences with doctors but this is not the normal
This is cool. I guess I can see how it would come across as an Onion article, but Doctors historically don’t actually take women’s pain in general seriously, let alone pain that is specific to women themselves. Awesome news.
It was one of the worst pains I’ve ever experienced and they gave me mother fucking tylenol.
I got the IUD after twelve years of trying to convince doctors my cramps were unusually bad, and being prescribed mother fucking tylenol, for what I later learned were “muscle spasms similar to labor,” every. single. month.
The IUD helped! If you have the same, ask about a Mirena and bring a flask of something strong. Like opium.
IUDs have to be inserted through cervix and from what I’ve been told by women pretty much universally, poking cervix in any way hurts like fucking removed. How is this not universally accepted and approached accordingly with pain meds or local anesthetics for the procedure?
fucking removed
What?..?
Self censorship, the hardest one to bypass
It’s a filter on lemmy.ml users and communities. They can’t say “Bitch” (female dog).
Hahahahaha, what times we live in
And lemmy is censorship resistant.
It still is. The filter isn’t applied to any other instances.
I had forgotten bitch is one of their naughty words. Pitiful.
They consider it a slur against women regardless of context.
From my experience, removal was more painful than insertion (I’m on #3), but regardless - how is this just now an issue?!??
Thank you
