![]() Every two years, I endure a PAP smear, pelvic exam and breast exam. I work for a large health care organization at which I also receive medical care. It does not releve my frustration when I am treated as a piece of meat and not a patient that deserves to maintain my humilty and humanity as a male patient. However, they are still looking at my genetalia and groin while stating that they have done this hundreds of times before. The women practiced professionsal nursing. I was only in the outpatient testing area 4 hours. I had a heart cath a year ago and had 6 different nurses looking at my genitalia and groins. Times are changing things I just wish that, as I get older and have more invasive outpatient procedures being done, that I, as a male, could get male nurses for my procedures. But it is quite appropriate for them to demand a female nurse for their needed medical procedure. Most of the female colleagues I work with are insulted when a male patient tells them he wants a male nurse performing his test or procedure. Yet they routinely expect me to allow them to practice their profession just because they are a " professional". I have met very few female colleagues that want me as a male nurse present for their female exams or procedures. Regardless of what people profess, they practice differently from what they preach. It is very rare that a male patient has a male tech do his scrotal ultrasound, or be the assistant for a routine colonoscopy. While women understand all too well how a sexual exam can turn into a humiliating experience, very few women ever have to worry about a male tech doing their mammogram or being the chaperone for their pelvic exam. The irony is that the female medical staff, whether doctors or nurses, say it much more often than their male counterparts. One of the most demeaming things that any medical professional, whether male or female, can say to a patient is that the person providing the care has done the same procedure hundreds or thousands of times before and understands how the patient feels at that moment. The women that come in are afforded every privacy in the book which all patients should get. Where I work, in a large primary care outpaient clinic that treats 12000 patients per year, 95 % male, men are just a number. Women medical providers are just as guilty as their male counterparts they have no issue with telling a male patient to drop his pants and bend over the exam table without ever giving him a gown or a drape. Staff will leave the door to the room open or walk in and out of the room with the male patient in varous stages of undress. Men go to a medical office fully clothed but yet are routinely expected to strip to the waist for chest x-rays or EKGs and never given a gown to maintain privacy or humility. I have heard of patients stating that they are never offered gowns if they are male whether the provider was female or male. I have never been offered a patient gown for my routine rectal exam in the last 20 years. I also think that the issue goes even further than just the issue of chaperones. They therefore elect to hire just female staff for all the patients. ![]() I have been told privately, off the record by doctors, that they cannot afford to hire male staff and keep the current female staff for the women's exams. I know that there are two standards of care that emphasize to women their right to a chaperone of the same sex as they are and deny men the right to have a male chaperone just because a male chaperone is not available. Many times my insurance dictated where I got treatment at not leaving me with options. I have been ostracized for even requesting that a male tech or nurse do outpatient testing of a sensitive nature or told to go somewhere else to get treatment. ![]() I normally state that I don't want a chaperone present just because a male chaperone is not available. Whereas a woman undergoing the genitalia exams had a woman chaperone, I have never been afforded the opportunity to have a male if a chaperone was needed for an exam. Every chaperone or assistant for any of my exams has always been of the doctor's choosing or the hospitals where I was getting treatment in. As both a male nurse and a patient, I have experienced both sides of the issue. Most of my nursing career has been as a RN with the first 14 years as an LPN. I think that this, at least for the male nurses I know, has become an emotionally charged topic.
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