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Ida Santana MD's avatar

True story- I’m a physician. Did all my residency and fellowship training in NYC. The last fellowship I did was Integrative Medicine, so I’m at the big Integrative Healthcare Symposium that Beth Israel used to host at the Hilton on 57th south of Central Park. And I graduated medical school in 2000. There’s a woman who’s a psychiatrist maybe twenty years older than me. We shared a meal and she tells me how she went to medical school at Yale. She got to her OB rotation in medical school. And the first thing you do on your rotation is scrub in and hold the retractor. You can’t move or break sterile field. So she’s scrubbed in holding the retractor on the operating room table as a woman’s abdomen is opened for surgery and the senior attending walks in and inserts his erection in her backside. She can’t speak or move or break field. She stand still as a statue. And when the surgery is over she goes to her father’s friend who’s a physician to write her a letter saying she has back problems and can’t stand for long periods of time and she can’t scrub in and takes it to her Dean to get out of having to see this man again.

I can tell you stories forever of how horrible OB is. There was one particularly evil OB attending when I was on my OB rotation at Baptist East in Memphis. We were warned by other medical students this man liked to throw scalpels at medical students who were wearing surgical gloves and a scrubbed in to try and nick your gloves. Women have always been mistreated in medicine and never more than in obstetrics.

I have stories for days of the the horrible behaviors that these people get away with.

The one that blows my mind is Jessica Valenti breaking the story of how ACOG- the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology built a multimillion dollar facility in Dallas to conduct in person board exams and is requiring OB’s from states where abortion is legal to travel to Dallas and face the possibility of being dozed, assaulted, and murdered by anti abortion Christian fasc-holes. It’s unconscionable what AGOG is doing. Truly insane and callous. They don’t give ONE SHIT about these OB’s safety. Boards are a BS hoax that costs millions and millions to put on and lead to ZERO improvements in clinical outcomes or benefits to patients. Medical Boards are sexist racist conservative institutions who don’t support doctors or women. Look at what the Medical Board in Indiana did to the OB who’d helped a 10 year old who’d been raped her to Ohio to have an abortion.

I did a rotation at Harvard’s Boston’s Children’s in my Palliative Care fellowship. They let a 12 year old black boy die rather than get a heart transplant because he didn’t have a foster family. The month I was there I sank into a depression. Coming from NY it was unbelievable that this could happen but Boston is racist in a way NY never ever has been. And my friend from Med school who did Emergency Medicine at Mt Sinai kept explaining- The bigger the name, the bigger the assholes.

It’s not at all surprising this happened at Yale.

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Cassandra Leigh's avatar

Thanks for sharing this 💔

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