double standard

Time to Get Our Patientzilla On!

I just finished talking to a woman about her experience traversing our paternalistic medical system. She’d been having very strange symptoms for months — dizziness, numbness and tingling in her head and hands, blurred vision. After a particularly scary episode, she went to the emergency room where the ER doctor, in her words, basically dismissed her by telling her she had none of the risk factors for a stroke — she was only 40, in good health, a nonsmoker. “It’s probably anxiety,” he told her. “Of course I’m anxious!” she said. “I have two little girls in the waiting room scared to death because they’ve never seen their mother like this and I’m scared because I don’t know what’s going on!”

Nonetheless, she left without any idea of what was going on, convinced it was all in her head. Another visit a week later to another emergency room, where this time the doctors performed a battery of tests, including a CT scan, MRI, blood work, etc. Again, nothing.

A few weeks later, with the symptoms now so bad she had to hold a coffee cup in two hands, she saw a neurologist. Again, a battery of tests. Again nothing. By … Continue Reading

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double standard gender bias patient-centered care patient-centered healthcare

Plan B: Another Double Standard

For what appears to be the first time in history, the head of the Health and Human Services Department has overturned a decision by the FDA. Was this regarding a drug that was so potentially dangerous it could kill or permanently maim people? A drug for which we have little clinical trial evidence or history? A drug that is produced in appallingly unsafe conditions?

No. It is a drug–actually, a single pill–for which we have years of safety and efficacy data, that is exceedingly safe and easy to use, and, get this — doesn’t even require a prescription from a doctor–if you’re 17 and older.

What it does is require is that the patients buying it be at least 17 years of age and head to the back of drugstores to give their names and identification to a pharmacist before receiving it. Oh, and if the pharmacist doesn’t want to provide it, he/she doesn’t have to. And it does require a prescription for those 16 and younger.

It’s Plan B, aka “emergency contraception.” All its manufacturer was asking was that we stop requiring that women who need it — those who had unprotected sex, missed a couple of birth control … Continue Reading

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double standard FDA HHS Plan B reprodutive rights Sebalius