It’s not the exaggeration that makes it badly written and controversial, it’s using the period question as a stand in for dismissal. Both things can be true: it is a good thing for med pros to ask this question AND doctors routinely discount women’s concerns AND this comic combines the two which is generating lots of discussion here.
Yeah, that comic is pretty badly written, jumbling together to many things to make a clear point while using extreme hyperbole to obfuscate its actual meaning even more.
Tbh, doctors (like anyone working any job) tend to fall into a pattern-matching routine quite often. My son has a chronic condition that required quite a few hospital stays over his life. Even though my son is not a woman and doesn’t get periods, there have been quite a few situations where doctors didn’t take him or us (both my wife and me) serious and/or were stuck in automatic mode.
One example (of many): We are in hospital, my son is there as an inpatient. He was maybe a year old at this time and sleeping in his bed. Nurse comes in and routinely checks his temperature with a forehead thermometer. It reads as 42°C (107.6°F) and the nurse panics and immediately sprints out of the room to get temperature reducing medicine. While she’s gone I touch his forehead and it doesn’t even remotely feel warm. I take the thermometer and check the temperature a few times and it always reads as 37°C (98.6°F) every time, so totally fine. She comes back with a syringe filled with medicine and I say “Stop, he doesn’t have high temperature”. She ignores me and moves to inject the medicine anyway, and I quickly pull out the thermometer to show her the temperature, telling her again to stop. Finally she relents and agrees to check the temperature again, which she does a few times and realizes he doesn’t have any fever after all.
Turns out, my son was hooked up to pre-heated oxygen, and apparently when she first took his temperature, she must have accidentally touched the oxygen hose with the thermometer, and the oxygen hose is preheated to 42°C.
I have numerous similar stories.
(That’s not to say that this problem doesn’t affect women more, but that the underlying problem is a human problem, not an anti-women problem. Women have more complex physiology, so it does make sense that they are a victim of something like that more often. But the underlying issue is not that doctors hate/dismiss women, but that doctors dismiss everyone whenever they have a plausible chance to do so. With issues like that it’s important to focus on the actual problem at hand, because that usually has a different and better solution.)
So it’s just badly written then
But yea it seems like your interpretation is correct, though the extreme amount of exaggeration in the comic made it less understandable
It’s not the exaggeration that makes it badly written and controversial, it’s using the period question as a stand in for dismissal. Both things can be true: it is a good thing for med pros to ask this question AND doctors routinely discount women’s concerns AND this comic combines the two which is generating lots of discussion here.
It is even less obvious that this comic would want to target both
Yeah, that comic is pretty badly written, jumbling together to many things to make a clear point while using extreme hyperbole to obfuscate its actual meaning even more.
Tbh, doctors (like anyone working any job) tend to fall into a pattern-matching routine quite often. My son has a chronic condition that required quite a few hospital stays over his life. Even though my son is not a woman and doesn’t get periods, there have been quite a few situations where doctors didn’t take him or us (both my wife and me) serious and/or were stuck in automatic mode.
One example (of many): We are in hospital, my son is there as an inpatient. He was maybe a year old at this time and sleeping in his bed. Nurse comes in and routinely checks his temperature with a forehead thermometer. It reads as 42°C (107.6°F) and the nurse panics and immediately sprints out of the room to get temperature reducing medicine. While she’s gone I touch his forehead and it doesn’t even remotely feel warm. I take the thermometer and check the temperature a few times and it always reads as 37°C (98.6°F) every time, so totally fine. She comes back with a syringe filled with medicine and I say “Stop, he doesn’t have high temperature”. She ignores me and moves to inject the medicine anyway, and I quickly pull out the thermometer to show her the temperature, telling her again to stop. Finally she relents and agrees to check the temperature again, which she does a few times and realizes he doesn’t have any fever after all.
Turns out, my son was hooked up to pre-heated oxygen, and apparently when she first took his temperature, she must have accidentally touched the oxygen hose with the thermometer, and the oxygen hose is preheated to 42°C.
I have numerous similar stories.
(That’s not to say that this problem doesn’t affect women more, but that the underlying problem is a human problem, not an anti-women problem. Women have more complex physiology, so it does make sense that they are a victim of something like that more often. But the underlying issue is not that doctors hate/dismiss women, but that doctors dismiss everyone whenever they have a plausible chance to do so. With issues like that it’s important to focus on the actual problem at hand, because that usually has a different and better solution.)
We need more staff and less stress but we live in a capitalist society :(