As I expected, no one understood my complaints about the three points from our soft-skills seminar I mentioned, but many people responded. I can't reply to everyone, so I'll just take MattD's post as representative and reply to that.
You're certainly welcome to hold whatever social and political views you like, as are your classmates. However, regarding the educational points you bring up, the goal is not to liberalize you, or to sway your beliefs in any way. The goal is to remote a bit of your naivete, which apparently you need.
It is an integral aspect of cultural liberalism to believe that those who hold to traditional morality are naive. If the goal is to remove my naivete, that reflects liberal assumptions. But why do you think that I am naive? Do you think I do not know that there are teenagers who are sexually active without their parents' knowledge, that there are battered women, that there are homosexuals? I know all of those things.
Furthermore, if the goal of the class is to remove students' "naivete" (naivete meaning belief in traditional morality), this seminar must be way beyond the point of diminishing returns, because as I said, 99% of my class already agrees wholeheartedly. Is the purpose to waste 2 hours a week of everyone's time, because it's that important to, uh, enlighten us remaining 1%?
The goal here is not to undermine the parents values and encourage the teen to sleep around. The fact is that while some teens are not sexually active, many are, either with or without the parent's knowledge. Sexual health and history is a very important part of your exam, and for you to help the teen achieve his/her optimal health, you need accurate and honest information about their sexual history. This is something they may feel the need to lie about in front of their parents. This is the ONLY reason you are asking the parents to leave. To facilitate honest communication. If you feel that it is important that the teen discuss this issue with the parents, you are free to encourage the teen to do so, but remember, he/she is your patient, and confidentiality applies.
My specific objection to this is the rule that the parents cannot be told if the adolescent doesn't want them to. You can say that's not liberalism, it's just optimal health, but liberalism promotes individual moral autonomy over traditional authority structures. If the laws have been modified such that dependent minors are now considered to have a legal right to privacy against their parents, that is a liberal development. Parents have authority over their children. They should have the right to know what their kids are up to.
Look, I have spent years observing liberals and closely analyzing their beliefs, statements, and thought processes. This is not about maxmizing health; it's about the belief in individual liberation from traditional authority. The overwhelming sense I got from my classmates when these topics were being discussed was the typical rebellious teenager attitude that parents are bad, they're clueless old fuddy-duddys who just don't understand the realities of life, they want to stop their kids from having fun, they are the enemy. These people's committment to sexual liberation is deeper than their commitment to health.
Sadly, many women ARE in abusive relationships. This can be uncomfortable to acknowledge and certainly is a tough thing to discuss. But the fact is, many women are abused and many women will not necessarily volunteer this information. Again, remember that it is your job to advocate for and fight for her safety and health. This means that if you have any suspicion AT ALL that somethign like this may be going on, it's your responsibility to delve into it. This doesn't mean you're 'accusing' someone. It just means you're checking off all the possibilities. While it may be uncomfortable, the first time you find out that someone IS being beaten and can help that woman, you'll understand why it's worth it.
My objection here is that this is not presented as something you should investigate if you have a reason to suspect it; it's presented as routine "screening" that should be done to all patients. I understand if a woman comes in with bruises and her eyes get shifty if you ask here where they came from. But these people really believe that if a woman comes to the ER with a kidney stone and is accompanied by her husband, no matter how pleasant and apparently happy together they are, you need to kick the husband out of the room to ask the wife about domestic violence.
If you think the only danger in being over-agressive is getting a reaction of "ick, anal sex" as one other poster put it, read this
blog entry sparked by a Boston Herald article and the commments on the article. Notice the people talking about refusing to take their kids to a pediatrician because pediatricians are now "screening" kids by asking questions about their parents' drinking, gun ownership, and whether their fathers make them feel uncomfortable. Notice the story in the Herald article (no longer available on the Herald site, but bloggers have reposted it) from the woman whose kids' pediatrician filed a
police report about her LEGAL gun ownership. I can't find it now, but there was a story from a guy in the comments of the Herald article about how he took his wife to the ER because she had a bad headache. Once she was taken to a room, a nurse called him to the front desk ostensibly to ask him some billing questions. The questions were so vague and purposeless that he immediately suspected that the only reason for them was to get him out of the room. When he returned to his wife, she told him that the very first thing they'd done when he left was ask her if she was feeling safe at home.
One of my "facilitators" for this liberal seminar is a female family doc. She told us that when a woman comes to her for a pregnancy test, if the, uh, "partner" accompanies her, she
always kicks him out of the room to give the woman the results, even if the couple came to the visit together for the express purpose of finding out whether she was pregnant. You can argue that all of her patients are poor black people so the incidence of abuse is higher, but of course, no one's saying THAT. This is being promoted as the standard for everyone. I would hope that if I ever get married, it would be to a woman who'd have the good sense to say, "no, I want him to stay, that's why we came together," and if the doc still objects, to say "screw you, we're outta here."
A complete medical history DOES include a sexual history. Do you think that just because that 75 year old hasn't had sex in the last week, that means that nothing in her sexual history could possibly have an impact on her current health? More importantly, do you really think that a 75 year old widow can't possibly be currently having sex? Plenty do..
And good for them! Being a widow doesn't mean SHE'S dead, after all, who's to say she hasn't met someone new! Also, there are plenty of people who are homosexual. This has implications on possible disease. There are plenty of bisexuals. ditto. Lots of people have been raped, both by the opposite sex and the same sex. This is important to know. These things are important to know so that you can insure that their sex lives are healthy and fulfilling. they're important to know so you can be aware of the potential for stds and other sexually related disorders. They're even important to know because sexual dysfunction can be a sign of other, non sexually related, disorders such as heart disease.
I didn't say the concept of a sexual history was wrong or invalid. Again, what I'm objecting to is that the "men, women, or both" question is being promoted as part of routine care for everyone. A happy, well-adusted, 50-year-old man who tells you he's happily married and has a great relationship with his wife comes to see you because he's been having heart palpitations; you ask him if he's sexually active with anyone other than his wife. Ridiculous. You can bet my reaction would be to find another doctor. There's no medical reason to ask a happily married person whose presenting complaint has no association with any sexually transmitted disease or anything else sexual whether they have homosexual sex. This is not health-related in motivation. This is based in the liberal belief that normality, that sane, healthy, civilized life, is a facade, that it's never real, that it's always barely covering up some deep social pathology, that underneath the surface of pleasant, "white bread" life we are really all hypocrites and libertines, slaves to our animal passions. See the constant liberal demonization of Leave It To Beaver as unrealistic, or the movie Pleasantville. You know what I'm talking about. THAT's why you ask absolutely every patient in every situation whether they have gay sex.
And now I can't help responding to Law2Doc's post, because I always dislike them so much.
Law2Doc said:
Some of the things you are describing are legally mandated (i.e. reporting of abuse), some are just common sense.
I said nothing about reporting abuse. What I am objecting to is attacking the foundations of civilized society by accusing men of whom one has no reason to suspect anything of wife-beating and child-molesting.
Additionally, if the child is sexually active or pregnant, the child may not be a child under the law for certain purposes, and so the law (not the school) mandates certain privacy rights. In most cases, you could be violating the law talking about a pregnant woman's medical care in front of a third party without the woman's consent, because pregnancy results in emancipation of a minor in a lot of jurisdictions. Not because it's the school or profession saying so, but because your legislature has said so.
Oh, right, that must be why we were told "unfortunately, however much we all disagree with it, that is the law; it would be nice if the law weren't so destructive of society and we should work to change it, but for the time being, we must comply."
The school, my classmates, and the profession ARE saying so. They agree with the liberal motivations of the law, think Christian sexual morality is evil, want to destroy traditional Western civilization, and are happy for any help they can get in doing so.
