Wait times, letting patients sleep, debt, etc.
Recently, doctor-activist and MD @DrBryanLeyva asked people, “What should we denormalize in healthcare?” Doctors, nurses, medical staff, and lay people came through with some pretty spot-on examples of what needs to be denormalized in health care.
Here’s what they said:
1. The perception/name of “birth control”:
I’d like to replace the word “birth control” with something that more accurately conveys how much of a medical necessity hormonal BC can be for mental/physical health Everyone should fuck if they feel like it but it’s very often more than just the “fuck if you feel like it” drug https://t.co/LcmuNdXivS
3. Healthcare worker burnout:
@DrBryanLeyva Labeling burnout as an individual problem and requiring the healthcare workforce to engage in self-care, healing, and recovery from burnout during personal time instead of building it in to the workday.
6. Explaining medical issues in clinical jargon:
@DrBryanLeyva Explaining things to patients in clinical language only. I had early stage thyroid cancer and related surgery about 5 yrs ago. Recently a scan came up with a “false positive” for a possible recurrence. My doctor explained this to me in very clinical language. It was unhelpful.
7. Fatphobia:
@DrBryanLeyva Fatphobia/conflating weight and health, disbelieving patients when their conditions are difficult to diagnose, allowing ableism/implicit bias to color assumptions about quality of life, providing mental health treatment that ignores structural oppression.
8. This list:
@DrBryanLeyva Denormalize:
Dismissing women’s pain
Using hormonal birth control as a panacea
Assuming overweight is the cause of rather than the result of patients’ symptoms Calling symptoms psychosomatic or “just stress”
10. Debilitating period pain:
@DrBryanLeyva That periods are meant to be painful, they aren’t. They arn’t meant to interfear with your day to day life. That endometriosis is a gynaecological disease, it is systemic chronic pain condition and extra-pelvic endo is far more common than drs believe it is.
11. Discharging patients with inadequate wound supplies:
@DrBryanLeyva Denormalize discharging patients w/out wound care supplies & thoroughly understood instructions.
13. Dismissing chronic pain:
@DrBryanLeyva Dismissing the pain of people with chronic pain. Also, dismissing legitimate medical issues in people living with mental illness.
14. Not listening to Black patients:
@DrBryanLeyva @TheRealNubian2 Not listening to black patients when they tell HCW’s they’re in pain or that something is not right with them.
15. Having the patient undress BEFORE talking to them:
@DrBryanLeyva Having patients get undressed and draped to converse, then doing the exam. Conversation should occur first, while dressed. Then, if necessary, patients change for exam.
16. And lastly, when patients can’t pay their bills and have to go into:
Did they miss anything? Let me know in the comments below!
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