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.
Ibuprofen is great at managing pain but is bad at handling suffering. Vicodin is good at handling suffering but isn’t a good painkiller. Suffering amd pain are not the same thing. You shouldn’t take vicodin because you jammed your thumb but ibuprofen and acetaminophen are both good for that.
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.
In medical terms they are distinct and different.
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.
I think its incompetance/negligence rather than malice here.
Occams razor stopped existing with the advent of social media. There is only intentional malice now
That’s Hanlon’s razor
It’s fear of having to explain why you are writing scripts for 1-2 pills when no one usually covers that.
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.
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.
What painkiller do we have evidence for being more effective other than possibly acetaminophen that isn’t an opiate or won’t come with other problems?
Lidocaine
And how do you propose that gets used?
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.
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.
Maybe bathing the IUD in a numbing lubricant, and coating the lady’s internals using a gentle wand with the same stuff? Assuming that sort of thing isn’t already done.
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).
Private medicine is why people distrust doctors in America. They like to believe they are corrupt because of the costs and drug scandals.
That’s way too broad of a statement, and one that I would question is true in even a small minority of cases. You’re thinking of Republicans.
As for the quality of care, there are many systemic issues with women’s health. Since this is a procedure that is exclusive to women’s anatomy, we can confidently exclude factors like women being excluded from the trials.
There is, however, a very simple explanation: Medical staff cannot sympathize with a pain they’ve never experienced. Men have no personal experience with the anatomy/physiology involved, on any level. We cannot truly understand how a vagina feels, nor any of the other parts. The best we can do is infer based on our own parts and experiences. The same is true in reverse.
But what about the women involved? They have the parts, but maybe not the experience. If they have never had an IUD, or the pain described in the article, they must also infer from their own experiences.
You seem to not understand that empathy actually does work even if you’ve never personally experienced something… maybe you don’t have empathy if you think this is how everyone else works because you apparently can only learn from or extrapolate from your own experience and you figure if you can’t do it no one can. Beyond that why would you assume none of the medical staff are women?
That’s way too broad of a statement, and one that I would question is true in even a small minority of cases. You’re thinking of Republicans.
While it’s true that Republicans would get off to a video of someone stomping a kitten, it goes beyond that. Men never take women’s health issues seriously. That’s why I exclusively seek out women doctors.
While I agree it’s too broad of a statement, I doubt it’s really split along party lines. I feel like most people irl don’t really lean heavily into politics while doing jobs and probably even have well-defined politics. I also don’t think you need to have experienced something firsthand to sympatheze better
Be a step in the right direction.
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.
Fun fact 2: the chainsaw was invented to open the pubic Symphysis joint during difficult child birth.
Bonus banger to enjoy how dismissive healthcare is for women.
(as one of my friends constantly reminds me, my facts are not very fun)
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.
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.
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.
I wish they had those same ethics with my first birth control when I was hospitalized with severe depression. I wasn’t even told it was a side effect. Ten years later there was a class action lawsuit and it was discontinued.
What about when it finds something you’ve been giving women for years has been causing people to try and sometimes succeed in committing suicide?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6193788/
And on a lesser scale it was a common experience in women’s dorms for a woman who got a boyfriend would go on bc, which would make her into such a mess (Mood swings, anxiety, depression and don’t forget weight gain and acne!) that the relationship would fall apart.
They always say, “it’s better than childbirth,” and it is, but does that have to be the bar? We don’t judge anything for men with “well, it’s better than childbirth.” We try to find ways to make it as painless as possible.
Which is why this is so overdue and appreciated.
and yet…
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.
If side effects are not death, surely they are worth it for many, so cancellation seems weird
It’s the result of weird ethical standards, which make the side effects justifiable for women since women experience all sorts of effects from periods that can in some cases get better with hormonal birth control. The fact that someone (many people I’m sure) might choose to deal with these side effects in exchange for their partner not having to, or just for additional safety, doesn’t factor in there.
I honestly think it’s rooted in the same beliefs that also make it hard to get any permanent body alterations done if not deemed “medically necessary”. Things like a vasectomy or HRT, both of which reportedly have tons of hoops to jump through to get them.
A lack of trust in people to be able to decide what to do with their own bodies.
Holy crap, is it not currently?
Many doctors dismiss a significant amount of pain complaints in general because of the small minority of drug abusers seeking pain meds.
How are we supposed to punish every single member of the tiny minority who abuse the system if we’re not allowed unlimited collateral damage with impunity?
It’s the mass suffering of the “lessers“ who can’t afford doctors who will just give them whatever drug they ask for. These people actually believe that being unsuccessful, or even slightly less fortunate, is some kind of moral failing, and, therefore, you deserve your fate.
Ghouls
American Exceptionalism hard at work.
That’s not what american exceptionalism means
It’s an ideology that is certainly popular here in the United States (although, far from the majority sociopolitical orientation), but it’s hardly unique to here, nor did it originate here. Humans have been both greedy and exploitative of other humans for our entire history. This isn’t an excuse, just sayin…
Edit: you know, I think a good example of American exceptionalism in practice is the rather foolish belief that once any group here has finally won any civil rights that we will just continue to have them forever without any work or effort in order to maintain or keep them.
Functional democracy are hard work. But they’re worth it.
A big historic example of this was back in the middle ages, when people didn’t have any idea about how to determine true from false when there were two conflicting views, they’d do a trial by combat because if you were right, how could you lose a fight specifically meant to determine if you were right?
Though exceptionalism does come into play because those who believe it about others seem to think something different is going on when they are the ones suffering. Like maybe it’s a test rather than a punishment, or there’s some complex plan that involves a period of suffering or something like that rather than just accepting that sometimes life isn’t fair.
Society should be all about trying to offset that unfairness, especially in areas like food, housing, healthcare, and (some) things typically covered by insurance.
It would seem that America doesn’t have a problem with collective punishment
It definitely didn’t when it put people in internment camps. I know people alive today who have defended that decision. That’s a small sample size, but it does support your argument.
In this case it’s a remnant of the history of gynecology being using slave women as unwilling test subjects and dismissing all objections from them
Well, as I can’t afford medical care, I wouldn’t know this. TIL.
I have a shoulder injury. I’m down to 6 pain pills and i’m so anxious about requesting more.
fucking shoulders… I had a rotator cuff that was hell for 6 years. I’m perfectly fine now, but I refuse to reach behind and to the right in the car to this day.
worsened by opiod crisis, and homeless population.
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.
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.
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.
There are no nerves in the cervix?? I don’t know, I’m not a doctor. Maybe it’s just nerves everywhere around the cervix which funnily enough, makes no difference
Iirc there are actually three major nerves that are stimulated by the cervix. What that doctor was referring to was the Kinsey report, which concluded in 1953 (against its own findings I might add) that the cervix was “the most completely insensitive part of the female genital anatomy.”
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.
I vomited in the exam room and passed out. I think they finally realized I wasn’t kidding.
What did they do when you passed out?
I thought I was going to pass out on the drive home. I should not have driven home. I didn’t make proper transportation arrangements because I didn’t know what to realistically expect. I have no idea how I got home.
A nurse waited with me until I came around and basically treated me for shock. I had orange juice and some sort of crackers and a blanket until I stopped shaking. They had me get up VERY slowly to make sure I didn’t get dizzy or throw up again. Eventually I was able to get dressed and drive myself home. Spent the rest of the day curled up on the couch with a blanket and hot water bottle sipping tea. It totally sucked.
I’m sorry that happened to you.
Thank you. I’m sorry it happens to anyone. There’s truly no reason it should.
Lololol no, you’re just told to take an ibuprofen
They told my wife this, but she’s on blood thinner and can’t have ibuprofen. Least you can do is read her medical history before telling her to take a dangerous drug combo
I was told to take 6 as if taking more would make it any less ineffective
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.
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.
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
I had forgotten bitch is one of their naughty words. Pitiful.
They consider it a slur against women regardless of context.
I don’t know, I think ml has some weirdness in its software that results in shit like this.
Dot ml considered “Bitch” a slur and blocks it. Kinda ironic in this case it stopped a woman from expressing herself.
Edit: actually rereading I’m not sure it’s a woman posting.
It was not a woman… Poking cervix in any way fucking hurts as fuck.
Lets see if this also gets censored.
Yeah, sorry, I realized after that I was mixing up comments when replying.
Fuck isn’t censored on your instance. It’s not a general swear filter, just anything that could be used as a slur.
From my experience, removal was more painful than insertion (I’m on #3), but regardless - how is this just now an issue?!??
Thank you
