Opinion: Medicine robs physicians of their fertility. Here’s how to fix it
The often-irreversible damage experienced by physicians and medical students who lose their fertility due to systemic pressures in medicine is unconscionable.
“The Retrievals,” a disturbing podcast from Serial and the New York Times released this summer, painstakingly tells the stories of women who sought fertility treatments at the Yale Fertility Center in 2020. Over the course of five months, women underwent egg retrievals without any pain medication. Although this procedure is typically done under heavy sedation, a nurse at the clinic had replaced fentanyl with saline.
This is not the first time a health care worker has diverted pain medications away from patients. One thing that stands out, though, is how the clinic ignored up to 200 women’s pain for such a long time. Imagine men undergoing vasectomies without pain medication. How many times would that happen before someone believed them? It’s safe to guess fewer than 200.
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