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Doctors, Nurses, And Patients Are All Sharing Things That Need To Be Denormalized In Healthcare – BuzzFeed

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.

Twitter: @DrBryanLeyva

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

Twitter: @nocksers

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.

Twitter: @KristiWhitePhD

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.

Twitter: @karen_eggleson

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.

Twitter: @maureen_brookes

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”

Twitter: @MrsAPriori

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.

Twitter: @curexcomplex

11. Discharging patients with inadequate wound supplies:

@DrBryanLeyva Denormalize discharging patients w/out wound care supplies & thoroughly understood instructions.

Twitter: @medickimw

13. Dismissing chronic pain:

@DrBryanLeyva Dismissing the pain of people with chronic pain. Also, dismissing legitimate medical issues in people living with mental illness.

Twitter: @kobwolfe

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.

Twitter: @alexiamizell_

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.

Twitter: @MrsAPriori

16. And lastly, when patients can’t pay their bills and have to go into:

Twitter: @Dracogen

Did they miss anything? Let me know in the comments below!

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