Do you mean doctors who spent years learning about abled white cis men’s bodies
do you know anything about the world besides what you read on tumblr
Okay but this is true?? Shut up with your bullshit, the medical industry for a very very long time has used the able bodied white cis male as their standard and that has very real healthcare consequences for a lot of people.
Do you know why most women don’t know when they’re having heart attacks? Why heart attacks kill more women than men? Because symptoms of a heart attack are different for women and the ones that doctors usually recognize and publicize are the symptoms experienced by men. Do you know why it’s so difficult for Black and Brown people to get diagnosed if they have skin cancer? Because doctors have been taught to recognize it on white people. People of size are constantly told that their problems are entirely because of their weight and doctors don’t even bother to look beyond that to be sure that’s the case. So those people have medical conditions go undiagnosed properly for years, and die in the process. Fuck, even just the fact that people think it’s okay to charge women more for healthcare because “they have extra parts” (?????) is indicative of the way the male body has been considered the standard for fucking ever. And the healthcare needs of disabled people or trans people? Forget about it.
OP is 1000% right. The medical industry has used the able cis white male body as their standard of care for CENTURIES and that has real consequences for the rest of us today. It’s getting better but it’s not where it should be. So fuck off with your snarky commentary, you’re wrong. The healthcare industry is not equipped to handle the needs of people with disabilities, women, PoC, trans people, people of size, etc. and that’s in large part due to the fact that the established body of medical knowledge was created by studying able, cis, white male bodies almost exclusively.
Hey there folks, speaking as a trained EMT and a pre-med student, I can confirm that the above person is approximately 7000% accurate. In my EMT training, I would repeatedly ask ‘’but what if my patent is a woman” or “what is my patient is a person of color” and at first all I got was shock. Then I got confused bumbling. I got some answers–basic symptoms of a heart attack in women, how to recognize cyanosis in someone of color, the basics of how to work with an autistic patient or someone who for whatever reason can’t communicate well with you. In fact, EMTs and other EMS workers are getting a lot better at learning the differences between the health care for a person of color or someone disabled. We were even told that we would need to ask our patients for their biological sex (I know, I’m really sorry, I know that there are people who find this intensely uncomfortable or even harmful, but there are real medical reasons for this and most decent EMTs will use whatever pronouns you ask them to). But most if not all of the answers we were given about women were directly related to gynecological issues. The guys teaching me? They were good guys. Nice. Funny. Smart. Devoted to caring for patients. Impassioned about protecting people, especially women and teenaged girls, from assault. Largely not sexist toward me or their coworkers. Hell, they were even smart enough to say “listen, boys, the women in this class have a higher pain tolerance than you, they just do, and as a rule if a women says their pain is a 5 on a scale of 1-10, assume it’s somewhere around an 8” when a kid laughed during the gyno unit. But they just didn’t know what to say when I asked “so if you’re supposed to palpate the patient’s chest, what do you do if your patient’s a triple-D” or when I asked “so if your patient gets menstrual migraines, how do you know if this headache is a stroke or not.” They had never been taught. This is a real problem, one that many medical professionals work hard to remedy once they start practicing. But this is not bullshit. At all. The standard patient is a cis white guy with no disabilities or chronic illnesses. It’s a huge fucking problem and I’m going to need you to step down with your bullshit, there, friend.
This has to be true. I mean, it’s the internet….
So I get what you’re saying here. Internet facts tend to be dubious in nature. You don’t know me personally. That’s fine, although I’m not sure why you bothered to reblog for just one snarky sentence. But, um…you asked in your tags why I didn’t do something about it, if I was so passionate about feminism…you mean like getting a pre-med degree so that I can be a doctor and try to help people? Because. Uh. That’s what I’m doing with my life right now. And why I got the EMT training I talked about here. And why I try to help people understand the flaws in the system so that they can help themselves, too. So. Yeah. I stand by what I said.
Also, you could have messaged me if you just wanted to call me a liar, would’ve been quicker, no?
So, this happened months ago but I think it’s still a worthy tale.
I was going to a conference this summer that I knew a bunch of my friends from all over the country who are also Fury Road fans would all be at. It’s not a film-related conference, but we kept half-joking that we should organize a MMFR screening because so many of us liked the movie. Except it was one of those situations where everybody was saying “yeah, we should do that,” with nobody doing it, so I was like Okay mofos, you all are talking about it but I will actually do it.
Because of the location of the conference and the fact that it was a number of weeks after Fury Road had come out, it was determined that going out to a movie theater was not practical. But most of us were staying in the conference hotel, and it turned out someone who was a fan who lived in the host city of the conference had a projector, and someone else had speakers, and someone else who maybe had learned how to schmorrent exclusively for this purpose got a copy of the movie. And then it turned out that all of the people I’d be sharing my hotel room with weren’t getting in until the second night of the conference, which meant that on the first night I’d have a hotel room all to myself, and that just seemed like fate. So I Facebook messaged maybe a dozen people who I knew were fans to say that we were all watching MMFR in my hotel room that night after the last event of the conference, and I expected maybe half of them to show up.
Except…somehow the word spread and people kept asking me about it. And of course I was like, yeah, invite anyone you want, cause it’s not like I was going to tell people to not watch Fury Road. Except, clearly I now had an obligation to deliver.
So another superfan and I spent the dinner break figuring out the best angle to project from and painstakingly taping a hotel bedsheet to the ceiling of the room to use as a screen, and then worrying that it would fall down because it was a much nicer sheet than any I own and therefore heavy. (It stayed up.) And it turned out that another fan solved the problem with the projector I couldn’t figure out, and the person who was doing the conference A/V for us had a cable we were missing, and I found a workaround for the speakers initially not hooking up to the projector.
And then people started showing up and they…kept showing up. People were sitting on the beds and on the chair and on the floor and on each other’s laps, and at one point there were at least two people sitting on a bench in the corner watching the movie through the opposite side of the sheet from everybody else. And in case you’re wondering how many people you can cram into a hotel room to watch a movie on a sheet, the answer is somewhere between 22 and 25, and the reason I don’t know the exact number is that some people showed up after we started the movie and it was dark, and some of them were friends of friends so I still don’t know who they were.
And among the audience were people who had seen the movie multiple times in the theater like me, and people who were watching it for the very first time, and while I would not say that a hotel bedsheet is the ideal virgin viewing experience for MMFR, if that’s how I got you to watch the movie, then so be it. And people who had seen the movie cheered at the Doof Warrior reveal, and everybody cheered when Max handed Furiosa the rifle, and it was generally awesome. And I am still meeting people I don’t know who were like “Oh yeah, I was at that screening! Thanks for organizing that!”
The next morning the rest of my roommates showed up before housekeeping had made the rounds and were like, “…What happened in our room last night?”
