It’s not just that some of the medical community isn’t aware or conscious of how to be respectful with patients who may be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or born with sex development differences – they aren’t necessarily educated on how to actually care for them.
This week the Association of American Medical Colleges put out a new comprehensive (free) resource guide for medical educators. The goal is to increase the focus on how to include people who don’t fit the stereotypical model of patients and treatments in previous medical school curricula. It’s not about adding a new, separate section on how to treat the LGBT community. It’s about including them because they are part of the community as a whole.
Beyond a real lapse in understanding of things like psychological or hormonal treatments, there is a level of judgement that can be present, and the AAMC is trying to eliminate that.
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Alice Dreger, a professor of medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and an unpaid contributor to the resource guide, shared what the future could look like in ten years, if the culture around medicine changes:
A physician who knows a patient is a transgender man or transgender woman will know exactly what screening tests that patient needs to stay healthy. A physician encountering a lesbian patient will not assume she “got that way” because she was sexually abused. A gay couple bringing their sick child to the ER will be treated with the same respect and care as a straight couple. And adults who were born with relatively unusual forms of sex development will already know their medical histories, and their doctors will understand them. Children who are variant in terms of their sex or gender identities will encounter doctors who recognize their real needs and their strengths, and will know how to encourage their families to do the same. The needs of patients will come before other social norms.
“These populations are already at increased risk for harm, and the last thing members of these populations need is for more harm to be accidentally added by medical professionals who aren’t well prepared,” Dreger added.
[Photo from flickr user John Hopkins Medical Archives]
