Great News!

Hello Dazzle! Thanks for coming and hanging out with me today, I’m glad that you are here. Today I wanted to celebrate that action has been taken to ensure body autonomy. DHHS put out a statement on 4/1/2024 (maybe not the best day to do this) that makes it clear that medical exams of all kinds require written consent from the patient. This is in direct response to the fact that doctors have been performing pelvic exams on women while they are under anesthesia.

What is really wild to me, is that the New York Times did a report on this issue in 2017 titled “She Didn’t Want a Pelvic Exam. She Received One Anyway.” It has been years since the nation has started talking about this issue publicly. Why did it take that long for formal action to be taken? It’s not like it was hard to write a one page letter to make it clear that this is illegal. Nor does it require any changes in the existing law that already required informed consent for all procedures, including exams of all kinds.

I think that it says a great deal about our country that this was a topic that needed to be debated at all. The law clearly requires informed consent. It’s not that hard. Yet, not legal actions have been taken against the doctors that have performed these exams. No action has been taken against any of the hospitals that made it policy to perform them. All that has been done is a statement that makes it clear that moving forward it cannot be done.

This is a win and will hopefully protect people in the future. However, it feels woefully inadequate. There is no way that doctors did not understand that what they were doing wasn’t right. As health care providers we are all taught that patients must provide informed consent. So why do they get a pass on this?

You can read the letter DHHS wrote here.

Well, that’s about it for my rambling today. Thanks for coming and spending some time with me. If you like my rambling then click on that like button. It really does help! Until we talk again, you take care of yourselves!