New Guidelines Call on Doctors to Take IUD Insertion Pain Seriously

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?
- 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.
- worsened by opiod crisis, and homeless population.
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
- 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
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
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.
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.

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)

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.
- 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...
- 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.
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.
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.

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.

- 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.

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.

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.
- 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.
- Occams razor stopped existing with the advent of social media. There is only intentional malice now
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
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

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?