Blog

It’s the thing no one talks about: abuse and mistreatment by health professionals. They are supposed to keep us safe, to help us, but this isn’t always the case. In my new post for HealthCentral I share my story of abuse and write about what you can do if this happens to you:

“First do no harm.

It is the sacred oath of physicians that reminds them of the power they hold, and enables us to trust them with our health, our lives, our bodies — the Hippocratic Oath. But what if one of the professionals on your health care team crosses the line to abuse or mistreat you?

Medical care can seem abusive

It is the nature of many medical procedures to be painful, seemingly as if they have been designed to hurt or scare you. Joint injections without anesthetic, nerve conduction tests that run electric currents directly into nerves, and let’s talk about the MRI tube with the loud banging sounds. Who came up with these, and why haven’t they figured out a better way of doing them by now?

But medical tests and procedures are not actually mistreatment or abuse. That requires cruelty, impropriety, or violence. And that can happen when you are interacting with a health professional separate from a treatment or device type.”

Read the rest of the post on what to do if you’ve been abused by a health professional.