I was denied sedation/effective pain meds before a procedure pretty recently. Despite the fact that I spent the entire time literally screaming in pain, they dismissed it as “anxiety” and did nothing to help.
I also received very little when I first came into the hospital - as my body was flooding with literal shit and I was fucking dying. They let me writhe and roll around for hours before they mercifully knocked me out for my operation.
I’m traumatized to the point where watching movies where people experiencing pain is upsetting. I was watching fucking Avatar the Last Airbender and wincing every time someone got punched or kicked.
I also go back to getting my IUD put in - again, another extremely painful procedure that is “not supposed to hurt” so there is no option for sedation or effective pain meds.
It feels like asking for pain meds gets you labeled as a drug seeker/addict too. I made the mistake of mentioning that I smoke weed (because I knew the anesthesiologist needs to know that) and it feels like it was instantly assumed that I’d be a pill popper too.
And I have extremely high pain tolerance. I’ve literally had people whip me until they’ve drawn blood. I’ve worked a fast food shift with a second degree (even a bit of third degree) burn going down the majority of my arm. I’m not a wuss, I know how to breathe in ways that help, I know how to go to a mind palace, but Christ, when you start digging around in someone’s guts with sharp objects, that’s not really something you can meditate away!
Is it training? Is it the fact that becoming a doctor in the U.S. requires the kind of upper middle class upbringing that doesn’t tend to help people develop empathy?
Yes. As you may or may not remember, the Sackler family spent billions on and made hundreds of billions off of getting the American south addicted to opiates over the 1990s and early 2000s. Every single doctor and hospital involved was sued by their former patients. There are still billboards up in some southern states advertising law firms that specialize in suing doctors over developed addictions.
So any doctor that graduated in the last 16 years has had one specific thing drilled into their head: Do. Not. Treat. Pain.
Because you will be sued if your patient is an addict or becomes an addict.
This has always affected doctors in the US, but the medical profession is a calling regardless. If you want money there are so many better pathways, leaving exactly three reasons people become doctors:
3: They have an uncontrollable natural urge to try to help others.
So 2/3rds of doctors are not going to fight their training and just try to prescribe pain meds as little as possible.
Of the remain 1/3rd of doctors or so, the ones that genuinely love helping others and want to deliver the best possible care, one bad experience with addicts can permanently change their attitude, and they may get hundreds of experiences per shift if they happen to do their residency in an ER inside any American city.
On top of all of this is the inherent gender and racial biases in medicine, and American medicine in general. Women’s pain is taken less seriously. It was in medical textbooks world wide until the 2020s that black people felt less pain and were genetically more prone to addiction. There was a literal course in every MA, RN, LVN, MD, etc course about “how different races feel and express pain.”
So if you want pain relief, you better have both the vital stats showing you are experiencing pain (which is awful for chronic pain sufferers who no longer have high BP/High pulse from their pain), and you better be a white man with a conservative lifestyle/look (because we know the gays are more likely to pop pills[This is literally in medical textbooks]), you better get lucky that you have a doctor willing to prescribe pain management, and even if you qualify at that point you better not ever ask for pain meds, period, regardless of your situation. As it only takes one single nurse or doctor to put drug seeking behavior on your chart to ruin your chances at ever receiving pain management ever again.
As a trans guy, I got about 50/50 “she” versus “he” despite being a fat balding bearded guy. I’m guessing that factored into it too.
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Every one broaching the topic in any possible way.
Here’s Johns Hopkins, one of the leading voices in American Medicine, saying gay men tend to use crystal meth. Here’s a meta study referenced in at least 30 textbooks(I stopped counting the books in the cited by section) saying all ‘sexual minorities’ are much more likely to have substance abuse issues, but bixsexual women are the most likely to be long term addicts. Here’s a more up to date article saying Trans people are by far the most likely to be long term addicts. That last one is only in one textbook but is directly cited in two organization’s drug policies.
Ah, yes, truly how math works. “I will break all doctors down into three arbitrary, mutually exclusive categories and then decide that they’re evenly distributed.”
How you wrote this and thought “Yup, sounds right” is beyond me.
I see you’re still stalking me and you still haven’t learned anything about hyperbole for argumentative purposes. No, for my ASD friends I do not literally mean, “2/3rds here’s quantifiable evidence of something no one has ever quantified because doctors are allegedly heroes (if you’re a straight white male) and here are my mathematical sources and proofs for this very minor and entirely immaterial point of this particular argument.”
Yeah, sure pal. I think the last time I interacted with you was a few days ago when you were being a little pissbaby in a thread about Zohran Mamdani, and then god only knows before that. I found this thread naturally and only stopped at your comment for how insufferably stupid your anti-doctor spiel is. “It’s just hyperbole, bro. Baselessly claiming 2/3 of medical doctors are egotists who don’t care about helping others and trying to assign paper-thin logic to it is hyperbole.”
The fact you’re calling this “stalking” shows you’re deeply unwell with abysmal judgment, but then so does most of what you put on Lemmy.
Edit: Wait, I just realized: what do you mean “still haven’t learned”? Are you mistaking me for someone else?