New guidelines recommend pap tests every three to five years, but many doctors are continuing to ignore recommendations and to pressure women into yearly testing. This is not surprising given doctors have a business to run. Bottom line, however, is the lack of informed consent being offered to women.
Informed consent is defined as follows:
Consent, particularly informed consent, is the cornerstone of patients’ rights. Consent is based on the inviolability of one’s person. It means that doctors do not have the right to touch or treat a patient without that patient’s approval because the patient is the one who must live with the consequences and deal with any discomfort caused by treatment. A doctor can be held liable for committing a Battery if the doctor touches the patient without first obtaining the patient’s consent. Federal Patients’ Bill of Rights legal definition of Federal Patients’ Bill of Rights. Federal Patients’ Bill of Rights synonyms by the Free Online Law Dictionary..
In theory every woman should be offered informed consent prior to doctors gaining access to the most intimate area of her body, but in reality this is simply not the case. Women are not being given information regarding the facts and potential harms of cervical cancer screening, nor are they being given the right to choose to screen or not – in fact, women often face a penalty of having prescriptions or other healthcare withheld if they refuse screening. http://forwomenseyesonly.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/what-some-male-doctors-do-when-women-say-no/
Men, however, are respectfully given information and then offered a choice in deciding whether or not they want to screen for prostate cancer – even though prostate cancer is roughly 19 times more prevalent than cervical cancer. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003-x/2012001/article/11616/tbl/tbla-eng.htm
Do your research, protect your healthy mind and body. jwh.2010.2349 (application/pdf Object). Above all, remember that women have the same right to informed consent as men. http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2009/11/informed-consent-missing-pap-smears-cervical-cancer-screening.html
When I last saw a GP because of a persistent chest infection, once he’d finished grilling me over my unwillingness to bare my bush for a pap test, he then asked permission to lift my shirt & listen to my chest. Which I had no problem with… but it’s odd, isn’t it? Asking me if it’s ok to expose a little bit of boobage, yet at the same time he expected me to drop my knickers & bare all without batting an eyelid…
My theory is that it only becomes important for medics to obtain consent when there’s a danger that the patient may accuse them of wrongdoing. We live in such a litigious society now – people are quick to complain if they feel a medic has harmed, neglected or assaulted them, but there’s never any danger of that when it comes to screening, at least when it comes to women’s health ‘care’. After all, the people we trust (well, some of us, anyway) to provide us with information have been lying to us for decades. They’ve been relentlessly churning out the same ‘screening is good, not screening is bad’ mantra for so long now that many people just can’t get their heads around the notion of overdiagnosis – try telling a woman that she may have been butchered because of a false alarm is like trying to tell a two-year old Santa doesn’t exist.
‘No! I don’t believe it! I just KNOW it saved my life! Infidel!’
So… back to the main issue… when we have so many women who have been successfully brainwashed into believing that these god-awful tests can only be beneficial, when women are so pathetically grateful that their lovely GP bullied them into tests because ‘it saved my life’… it’s of no benefit to the medical profession or the screening authorities that are busy gobbling up OUR money to encourage informed consent. That would mean actually admitting that these tests are reliable and hazardous to your health, and we can’t have that can we?
Thanks so much Katrina for this. Drs must be taught very carefully to ignore/downplay/manipulate how women feel about vaginal invasion. Speaking of that, here is an interesting article – yet another dr convicted: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-01-18/news/ct-met-gynecologist-rape-trial-0118-20130118_1_bruce-sylvester-smith-tameka-stokes-predatory-doctors
And an article in support of your comments regarding screening: http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2012/10/16/check-ups-health.html