Letter to PALS
Jan. 3rd, 2013 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ailbheHi,
While at my pre-op today for a gynaecological issue I saw a notice up asking that staff remind women to shave before surgery. I asked the nurse if I should shave, and she said no, but that the consultant preferred "ladies" to "tidy the garden."
The consultant's aesthetic preferences are not a patient's concern, and should never be made a patient's concern, and if there is no surgical need - no incision within the hairline, etc - then there is no medical requirement to depilate. Genital exposure is personal enough without bringing the surgeon's personal aesthetic preferences into it.
I have a personal preference for a gynaecologist who can cope with normal adult female anatomy.
A.
While at my pre-op today for a gynaecological issue I saw a notice up asking that staff remind women to shave before surgery. I asked the nurse if I should shave, and she said no, but that the consultant preferred "ladies" to "tidy the garden."
The consultant's aesthetic preferences are not a patient's concern, and should never be made a patient's concern, and if there is no surgical need - no incision within the hairline, etc - then there is no medical requirement to depilate. Genital exposure is personal enough without bringing the surgeon's personal aesthetic preferences into it.
I have a personal preference for a gynaecologist who can cope with normal adult female anatomy.
A.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-03 11:36 pm (UTC)Sorry, I am kind of running out of words.
All I can say is YES you are so right.
And NO, that request from the hospital, or any request of it's kind, is absolutely inappropriate and downright wrong. Like morally wrong. Women get to be any way we wish to be regarding our public hair. And for it to be required to be otherwise for any reason other than medical is... [I've actually just been trying to work out how the prescribed removal of body hair must actually breach our human rights in some way, but I am can't work out which article that would come under in the Convention. Surely we have a right to freedom about this?]