By Sharanya Gopinathan
How would you feel if you woke up from being anaesthetised after a routine surgery to find out that your body had been used to teach a batch of medical students how to conduct pelvic exams?
A new documentary called At Your Cervix is examining the histories and trends in the ways medical students are taught to give pelvic exams, and aims to find non-problematic ways to teach how to give them.
There’s clearly a need to find these non-problematic ways, because this documentary reveals that medical students are taught how to give pelvic exams in deeply horrifying ways. It details how in the US and Canada, students are taught how to give pelvic and breast exams on unconscious female patients who never consented to having their bodies used in this way, and who never find out about it later when they regain consciousness from anaesthesia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xcI0Q_MrC0
It’s a terrible thing to happen, and is more common than you think. A casual poll undertaken by a Canadian medical student of her acquaintances in the profession revealed that 72 percent of the doctors and medical students polled had done medical exams on unconscious patients without consent. It’s yet another way in which women’s bodies and privacy are abused and used as tools without their consent. It also gets you thinking that a part of how dismissive doctors are of women and their pain could possibly be because they’re taught to be dismissive of women, their agency, and their rights over themselves through practices like this.
The documentary also explores better ways in which medial students can learn to give pelvic exams, which include introducing a culture of consensual self-examination.
This documentary focuses on this practice in the United States, and there are reports of such practices in Canadian hospitals too. We don’t know if this is a practice in Indian hospitals and medical schools, but if you’ve heard of something like this happening in India, do let us know.
July 25, 2017 at 12:00 am
I am a woman, a feminist, and a medical student, and there is a lot of information that has been omitted from this article that makes this an inflammatory post that is designed to outrage, while missing several key facts. First, medical students only learn and perform pelvic exams during their Ob/Gyn rotations, when they are directly supervised by an attending physician who specializes in women’s health. Any exams they perform in the OR are performed on patients who have already presented for gynecology care. It’s not as if some random medical student in the OR is waltzing in to a hip or shoulder surgery and thrusting open a woman’s legs to perform a pelvic exam. Secondly, they have consented to this. Every teaching hospital is required to notify patients upon admission and registration that medical students will be a part of the care team, and that they may perform procedures under the immediate supervision of a senior physician. Patients are required to consent to this when they decide to seek care at the hospital. Any medical student working on a patient has met the patient in the pre-approved area before they have the operation. Third, your suggestion that medical students should consent to doing it on each other while conscious shows that you clearly know nothing about medical education, and your misplaced outrage is directly tied to your ignorance. Medical students have already been highly trained before they are ever allowed to touch a patient. They have completed a full anatomical dissection, as well as performed extensive simulations in a lab setting beforehand. Pelvic exams hurt, no doubt about that. It would be wrong to force female students (who only comprise 30-40% of a given med school class) to repeatedly Undergo multiple exams when there is no male equivalent. Can you imagine having more than one pap smear in a day for days at a time!? The only appropriate way for students to learn to be better is to perform pelvic exams on a real human under a watchful physician, and the sedation and anesthesia means the patient will not feel pain during or After the procedure.
September 19, 2017 at 10:10 pm
Ive read a lot about this and your missing the point. A lot of the time the consent is part of a massive form and it NOT brought to the woman’s attention that this will happen. I have had several surgeries in my womb and I would be furious if I found this was the case. Just because I consent to a media law student (which I never do) performing routine procedures while I am awake or participating in my surgery (I would never) I would expect that these participation would be directly related to my surgery. The point is this is not happening. Women are going in for laparoscopies, ablation etc and are having Pap tests and training session while under anaesthetic without their knowledge. Procedures that are totally unrelated to their surgery. I would not expect that from consenting to a student being a part of my care. Maybe if doctor did train on each other, they would learn a bit of compassion. I’ve had surgeries since I was 15 and they just don’t understand pain and hurt unless they have experienced it themselves. It makes ben good doctors. Your argument that it’s better for the woman as it’s not painful is moot as they were not necessary in the first place. It is, no matter how you dress it up, medical rape. And you seem to support that. It should be an individual lone form that clearly states this that should be singed. If not, nothing else is an acceptable excuse. We are aliveness human being, not medical donations after death.