Jesus F Christ

If you happen to have had a gynecological surgery at a major teaching hospital in the U.S., there’s a good chance that after you were given the anesthetic, several medical students used your unresponsive body to learn how to perform a proper pelvic exam. Each student would have inserted two fingers inside your vagina and placed one hand on your abdomen, feeling for abnormalities in your uterus and ovaries. This would have been done entirely for their benefit, not yours. And after the surgery, you would have been sent on your way, with no mention of these exams and with no knowledge of your role as a teaching tool.

You, like many women, might feel that this constitutes a serious violation of both your body and your trust. This may sound like something that should have been left behind long ago in the days where medical paternalism was the norm. But this practice still appears to be commonplace in many teaching hospitals in this country. While little data has been collected in terms of frequency, medical students across the country are familiar with the practice and engage in heated debates regarding the ethics of the practice in online forums.

  

There's a debate?!? It's clearly unethical. End of debte.

The women are having the surgery in a teaching intstitution, they understand that.  They can - and many, if not most, would - give consent, FFS.  This is unconscionable.  I had no idea it was happening.

There are also other ways to learn how to perform a pelvic examination. Following public outcry, performing pelvic exams on women without their consent has been banned in California, Virginia, Hawaii, Illinois, and Oregon, and several professional bodies in medicine have condemned it. Teaching hospitals in these places often hire professional patients to guide students through the process of giving a pelvic exam, or they use electronic teaching mannequins. Others have just incorporated specific consent for pelvic exams into medical education. It’s time for the rest of the country to catch up.

Well, no shit.