Friday, January 29, 2010

Weekend Movie: Taking on nonconsensual exams by med students

After finding out yesterday about the abhorrent practice of medical students performing pelvic exams on patients under general anesthesia without their consent, I MUST feature this documentary, Check out "At Your Cervix" (not to be confused by the fabulous eponymous blog).



"The documentary 'At Your Cervix' explores the connection between the way medical and nursing students are taught pelvic exams and the reality that most women experience them as painful and disempowering.

'At Your Cervix'
breaks the silence around the unethical methods used by medical and nursing schools to teach students how to perform pelvic exams; the most egregious being on unconsenting, anaesthetized women."


The original article: Time to end pelvic exams done without consent

Other blog posts on this outrageous practice, besides the one from Unnecesarean at the top of this post:

PhD in Parenting (from whom I got others): Canadian women are livid, and rightfully so
Sassymonkey: Not without my consent
Three Seven: I think I might throw up
Bad Moms Club: Bad Moms don’t Like Non-Consensual Nether-Probing
Living My Social Work: “Implied” Consent
Coffee with Julie: A pelvic exam without my consent?
Chaos Theory: Does the Canadian Medical Association Support the use of Roofies too?

Pissed off? Sign the petition from Her Bad Mother.

3 comments:

  1. This makes me wonder if this sort of thing is happening in the US too. When I was under for my C-section, were med students giving me an exam too?! I want to ask my new OB about it, but I figure I can't trust his answer.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I wondered the same thing, did some looking around, and found an article from this past June about the same problem in America, and a few others clearly referring to the States as well.

    Yep.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great post! I wrote about this yesterday too (http://momsgymbag.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-happened-to-informed-consent.html) because some of what I read indicated it's not just women, it's men too (getting rectal/prostate exams while under anesthesia. Seriously, why is this ok?

    ReplyDelete