Unconscious Patients Are Getting Their Vaginas Probed By Med Students

You’re lying there unconscious.

Without your consent a guy slides something inside of you to get a better look.

Rape? Nope.

Merely a teaching exercise for medical students to learn about pelvic exams.

In Canada is it common practice for surgery patients to be subjected to pelvic exams while they are still unconscious from surgery as a learning tool for the docs. In the US and UK this is banned, because patients need to give consent. In Canada the consent is “implied.”

Andre Picard said in The Globe and Mail:

The long-standing argument in favour of allowing these exams to be done on surgery patients is that it provides a unique opportunity for students to practice the delicate, invasive examination without causing the woman pain or embarrassment.

There is also an assumption that women would never accept pelvic exams by students while conscious so sneaking them in, while not ideal, is acceptable.

But then a doctor decided to look further into the disgusting practice and learned that less than one in five women knew this was a possibility and that 72 % expected to be asked for consent explicitly before such a procedure was done. “You don’t probe, poke or otherwise invade the orifices of a patient without their permission, regardless of how educational it might be. Period.”

Bizarrely, this whole massive violation of rights thing could be avoided if they had asked the patients for consent, because 62% would consent, if they had been asked.

As a learning tool, an unconscious women is actually no help for experiencing pelvic exams on conscious women. As Kate Harding explains in Broadsheet:

What makes a pelvic exam bearable, as a patient, is communication with the person performing it. You know what the great thing about being awake is? If it hurts, you can say something. And the practitioner can then do something to make it stop hurting. Practicing on an unconscious woman may mean she doesn’t feel any pain, but it doesn’t mean you’ve learned how to do the job without causing any. Nor how to deal with a patient who just can’t relax, no matter how many times you explain that the process would go much more smoothly if she did; an unconscious woman isn’t instinctively clenching her muscles while trying to act cool. An unconscious woman also isn’t going to be able to tell you that the speculum is freezing or you need more lube or that, say, she’s a sexual assault survivor who finds pelvic exams traumatic. And above all, an unconscious woman cannot give you permission to put things in her vagina. [emphasis in original]

However the doctors frame this, this is sexual assault. How much ripping and tearing being caused by these inexperienced hands? The medical establishment would never allow practice prostate exams under these conditions. It is shocking how often our rights over our bodies are violated for our own good or for the good of society.

The scary thing is the take home message for the young medics, that a patient’s body is there to do with what they will while the patient is under their care.

I’m so creeped out by this I can’t even process it. I’ll leave the final word to Ogden Nash, who, as always, knows just what to say.

from The Adventures of Isabel:

Isabel met a troublesome doctor,
He punched and he poked till he really shocked her.
The doctor’s talk was of coughs and chills
And the doctor’s satchel bulged with pills.
The doctor said unto Isabel,
Swallow this, it will make you well.
Isabel, Isabel, didn’t worry,
Isabel didn’t scream or scurry.
She took those pills from the pill concocter,
And Isabel calmly cured the doctor.

I foresee a series of very expensive law suits in store to cure these doctors.