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.
tangentwithtanner
areudirty
annaxmalina
