Great article from http://www.whale.to/vaccines/god.html
A few notes from me (Yazz) in purple and italic (can’t change it into the colour I want, sorry! >_< I haven’t figured out yet how to use this text editor very well..)
Links in the article aren’t working, go here to click the links.
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God as Modern Medicine
The Church of
Allopathy
“When science cannot be questioned, it is
not science anymore: it is religion.”–Tony Brown (source)
“We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical
profession.”–GB
Shaw
The great trouble with vaccination is that it vaccinates the mind.—Elbert
Hubbard
[The lie of atheism
is promoted by the Cartel though the media and State, to cut off our Higher Self
connection (called soul murder carried to extreme. See:
Alice Miller) so our inbuilt need to believe in God (as
Maslow
worked out), can be transferred onto covert
pseudo-Gods (false idols) such as political parties, with the main one being
Allopathy (disguised under
terms such as “Modern”, “Conventional” or “Orthodox” Medicine) which becomes a
secular religion and explains why some people have such problems giving up
belief in vaccination, and modern medicine.
It would be very hard to find a spiritual person who is into
Allopathy, which tells a story. Anyone who has been vaccinated
or has their children vaccinated is worshiping (covertly mostly) this
false-God. Most of the other false Gods are detailed in
“Simulations of God, The Science of Belief “ by
Dr John Lilly.
Church zealots are identified by tags such as ‘HealthFraud’,
‘Quackwatch’, ‘Skeptic’, Church Non-believers and Heretics by tags such as
Quack, Crank, Denialist, Altie,
Loons,
‘Conspiracy nut’,
‘Anti–vaccine‘, ‘anti-science’. This Church is very important to the Elite
(“the medical power has
become the government’s ally, as was the Catholic Church in the past“—Olivier Clerc)
as they make
most of their money through it and keeping us
in fear is mind control basics. Just
one of the heads, The Cancer Industry, turns over $110 Billion every year in the
USA alone. And just like Don Juan’s benefactor created a monster to keep
him under his control, and the Catholic Church created Hell, so Allopathy (and
its Master) uses Fear of
Disease (and fear of quacks )
to sell drugs and prevent people from venturing outside the Allopathic wood.]
Quotes
“What does a Catholic do when he decides that his priests are no good?
Sometimes he directly challenges them, but very seldom. He just leaves the Church. And
that’s my answer. Leave the Church of Modern Medicine. I see a lot of people doing
that today. I see a lot of people going to chiropractors, for example, who wouldn’t
have been caught dead in a chiropractor’s office a few years ago.“– Confessions
of a Medical Heretic
“Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to
baptism.”—-Samuel Butler
To teach the Rockefeller drug ideology, it is necessary to
teach that Nature didn’t know what she was doing when she made the human body.——-Hans
Ruesch
“Despite the tendency of doctors to call modern medicine an ‘inexact science’,
it is more accurate to say there is practically no science in modern medicine
at all. Almost everything doctors do is based on a conjecture, a guess, a
clinical impression, a whim, a hope, a wish, an opinion or a belief. In short,
everything they do is based on anything but solid scientific evidence. Thus,
medicine is not a science at all, but a belief system. Beliefs are held by
every religion, including the Religion of Modern Medicine.”
Robert Mendelsohn MD Preface by Hans Ruesch to 1000 Doctors (and
many more) Against Vivisection
“The machinery looks good, the technology
seems nice, the stainless steel is shiny, everything smells like isopropyl
alchohol; I mean they are the greatest salesmen in the world. We’re going
to go look back at this century and we’re going to laugh eventually, but we’ll
cry first. This is one of the most barbaric periods. It’s going to
be called the Dark Ages of Medicine.”—-Dr Shulze
(The Sam Biser Herbal Video Collection p198)
“Clergy are kind of like medical doctors. Many folks who
regularly visit MDs say, ‘My doctor is SOOO nice!’ but they’re obviously being
murdered by expensive instalments, even so. In other words, charisma is more
important to these fools than discernment. Let’s
face it, if these characters weren’t charismatic how could they get so much
money and devotion from the incredulous Pyjama People who will probably always
be the majority? Sure, it’s relative; the PJ man of today probably knows more
and is more socially advanced and less prejudiced than the savvy man of ancient
Rome. In other words, clergy mostly behave as any other kind of parasites do:
they will delay the death of the host (in this case, the creative Core of the
religion) for as long as possible because the host’s survival ensures the
parasite’s vitality.“—- Godhead by Don
Croft
- “Physicians have taken the place of priests;
- vaccination plays the same initiatory role as baptism, and is accompanied by the
same threats and fears; (note from Yazzmyne: in Gynecology I believe, the first pelvic exam of a young virginal girl is used as an initiatory ritual to baptize her into the women-oppressing religion known as Gynecology and is logically also accompagnied with the necessary fears and threats to keep her under control (forever from that moment on)) (Moreover, in ancient religions, young children were often sacrificed at the altar for some God. In gynecology we can see the altar being replaced by the exam table and the young girl’s body, mind and soul is being sacrificied to the patriarchal God = the gynecologist) - the search for health has replaced the quest for salvation;
- the fight against disease has replaced the fight against sin;
- eradication of
viruses has taken the place of exorcising demons; - the hope of physical immortality
(cloning, genetic engineering) has been substituted for the hope of eternal life; (Yazz: the God-given power that people have to reproduce life through sex has been replaced by technology like IVF. And ofcourse, the Godgiven power that women possess to give birth to new life has been stolen from her and replaced by the OB as God and bringer of new life)
- pills have replaced the sacrament of bread and wine; (Yazz: ‘the pill’ taken almost daily by women worldwide has become her daily prayer)
- donations to cancer research
take precedence over donations to the church; - a hypothetical universal vaccine could save
humanity from all its illnesses, as the Saviour has saved the world from all its sins; (Yazz: the hypothetical universal pap smear/pelvic exam conducted by the Holy Gynecologist (not only does he replace the priest, but during childbirth he even replaces God!)could save womanhood from all its diseases)
- the
medical power has become the government’s ally, as was the Catholic Church in the
past; - “charlatans” are persecuted today as “heretics” were yesterday; (Yazz: women who want to birth naturally at home including midwives and doula’s are persecuted and ridiculed like the witch-hunting during the middle ages. In fact the witch hunting never really stopped, it has been on-going since then.)
- dogmatism rules out promising alternative medical theories. (Yazz: the war against natural healing therapies and holistic healers has replaced the war against infidels)
- the same absence of
individual responsibility is now found in medicine, as previously in the Christian
religion; - patients are alienated from their bodies, as sinners used to be from their
souls.”—Olivier Clerc (Yazz: women have never stopped being sinners for the allopathic church. As Eve was the sinner and thus all women cursed to suffer, so are women cursed to suffer for her womanhood(because womanhood is considered a sin in modern medicine), not only is her body expected to become dysfunctional and cancerous at any point, but also is her greatest power to give birth cursed into something she has to suffer through that disables and victimizes her instead of naturally empowering and she is trained to become GOD-FEARING accepting his punishments as a natural effect of her un-erasable sin for being a woman. So when he offers his ‘help’ (albeit not for free), she is thankful for being saved)
“I no longer believe in Modern Medicine. I believe that despite all the
super technology and elite bedside manner….the greatest danger to your health is the
doctor who practices Modern Medicine. I believe that Modern Medicine’s treatments for
disease are seldom effective, and that they’re often more dangerous than the disease
they’re designed to treat. I believe more than 90% of Modern Medicine could disappear
from the face of the earth—doctors, hospitals, drugs and equipment—and the effect on
our health would be immediate & beneficial……Modern Medicine can’t
survive without our faith, because Modern Medicine is neither an art nor a science.
It’s a religion.”—Dr
Robert Mendelsohn MD
This is an incredible admission. First, what is a vaccinologist? Do
you go to school to learn to be one? How many years of residency
training are required to be a vaccinologist? Are there board exams?
It’s a stupid term used to describe people who are obsessed with
vaccines, not that they actually study the effects of the vaccines, as
we shall see throughout this meeting. Most important is the admission
by Dr. Johnson that he and his fellow “vaccinologist” are so blinded
by their obsession with forcing vaccines on society that they never
even considered that there might be factors involved that could
greatly affect human health, the so-called “uncertainties.” Further,
that he and his fellow “vaccinologists” like to think in concrete
terms-that is, they are very narrow in their thinking and wear
blinders that prevent them from seeing the numerous problems occurring
with large numbers of vaccinations in infants and children. Their goal
in life is to vaccinate as many people as possible with an
ever-growing number of vaccines. On page 17 his “concrete thinking”
once again takes over. He refers to the Bethesda meeting on Thimerosal
safety issues and says, “there was no evidence of a problem, only a
theoretical concern that young infants’ developing brains were being
exposed to an organomercurial.” Of course, as I shall point out later,
it is a lot more than a “theoretical concern”. He then continues by
saying, “We agree that while there was no evidence of a problem the
increasing number of vaccine injections given to infants was
increasing the theoretical mercury exposure risk.”
It’s hard to conceive of a true scientist not seeing the incredible
irony of these statements. The medical literature is abound with
studies on the deleterious effects of mercury on numerous enzymes,
mitochondrial energy production, synaptic function, dendritic
retraction, neurotubule dissolution and excitotoxicity, yet, he sees
only a “theoretical risk” associated with an ever increasing addition
of thimerosal-containing vaccines. It is also important to note that
these geniuses never even saw a problem in the first place, it was
pressure from outside scientists, parents of affected children and
groups representing them that pointed out the problem. They were, in
essence, reacting to pressure from outside the “vaccinologist club”
and not discovering internally that a problem “might” exist.
In fact, if these outside groups had not become involved these
“vaccinologists” would have continued to add more and more
mercury-containing vaccines to the list of required vaccines. Only
when the problem became so obvious, that is of epidemic proportion
(close to that now) and the legal profession became involved would
they have even noticed there was a problem. This is a recurring theme
in the government’s regulatory agencies, as witnessed with fluoride,
aspartame, MSG, dioxin and pesticides issues.
[2004] THE TRUTH BEHIND THE VACCINE COVER-UP
By Russell Blaylock, M.D.
“Society today is paying a heavy price in disease and death
for the monopoly granted the medical profession in the 1920’s. In fact, the situation
peculiarly resembles that of the 1830s when physicians relied on bloodletting, mercurial
medicines, and quinine, even though knowing them to be intrinsically harmful And precisely
the same arguments were made in defense of these medicines as are employed today, namely,
that the benefits outweigh the risks. In truth, the benefits accrue to the physician,
while the patient runs the risks.”—Harris Coulter (Divided Legacy Vol 3)
“For a pediatrician to attack what
has become the “bread and butter” (vaccines) of pediatric practice is equivalent
to a priest denying the infallibility of the pope.——-Dr Robert Mendelsohn, M.D.
“I was at one time a great lover of the medical profession. . . . I no
longer hold that opinion. . . . Doctors have almost unhinged us. . . . I regard the
present system as black magic. . . . Hospitals are institutions for propagating sin. Men
take less care of their bodies and immorality increases. . . . ignoring the soul, the
profession puts men at its mercy and contributes to the diminution of human dignity and
self control.. . . I have endeavoured to show that there is no real service of humanity in
the profession, and that it is injurious to mankind. . . . I believe that a multiplicity
of hospitals is not test of civilization. It is rather a symptom of
decay.”—–Mahatma Gandhi
“Medical politic is the art of sheer power. There is no compromise:
you go right for the jugular vein before your own is torn out. There’s no room for
compromise because churches never compromise on canon law….in medical politics there is
a rigid authoritan power structure which can be moved only through winner-take-all power
plays. Historically, doctors who have dared to change things significantly have been
ostracized and have had to sacrifice their careers in order to hold to their ideas.
Few doctors are willing to do either.”–Dr Mendelsohn (Confessions p 129)
“Vaccines have become sacraments of our faith in biotechnology in
the sense that 1) their efficacy and safety are widely seen as self-evident and needing no
further proof; 2) they are given automatically to everyone, by force if necessary, but
always in the name of the public good; and 3) they ritually initiate our loyal
participation in the medical enterprise as a whole. They celebrate our right and power as
a civilization to manipulate biological processes ad libitum and for profit, without undue
concern for or even any explicit concept of the total health of the populations about to
be subjected to them.”—Richard
Moskowitz M.D. http://www.healthy.net/library/articles/moskowitz/vaccination.htm
“The more you depend on forces outside of yourself, the more you are
dominated by them.” –Harold Sherman
“If you don’t believe (HIV=AIDS), you’re a heretic,” he says. “So
the best way to deal with the dissidents is to ignore them, silence them and wreck their
careers.”–Professor Charles Geshekter http://www.gadfly.org/current/chrismagg.html
“The STATE – influenced by the church of medicine – [FORCED] parents to
call their exemptions “religious.” I know parents who would prefer that
the *church of medicine* be officially identified as a religion so that schools could
properly identify much of the church of medicine’s “health science” as
religion!”–Todd Gostaldo DC
“Awe-inspiring medical technology has combined with egalitarian
rhetoric to create the dangerous delusion that contemporary medicine is highly effective.
Although contemporary medicine is built on this erroneous assumption, it is contradicted
by informed medical opinion.”–Ivan Illich (Medical Nemesis)
“The study of the evolution of disease patterns provides
evidence that during the last century doctors have affected epidemics no more
profoundly than did priests during earlier times.
Epidemics came and went, imprecated by both but
touched by neither. They are not modified any more decisively by the rituals
performed in medical clinics than by those customary at religious shrines.”—–Ivan
Illich. Limits to Medicine, page 15
“Most patients probably assume that when a doctor proposes to use an
established treatment to conquer a disease he will be using a treatment
which has been tested, examined and proven. But this is not the case.
The savage truth is that most medical research is organised, paid for,
commissioned or subsidised by the drug industry (and the food, tobacco
and alcohol industries). This type of research is designed, quite
simply, to find evidence showing a new product is of commercial value.
The companies which commission such research are not terribly bothered
about evidence; what they are looking for are conclusions which will
enable them to sell their product. Drug company sponsored research is
done more to get good reviews than to find out the truth.“—-Dr Vernon Coleman
“Doctors go to great lengths to disguise the fact that they are
practising a black art rather than a science. The medical profession has
created a ‘pseudoscience’ of mammoth proportions and today’s doctors
rely on a vast variety of instruments and tests and pieces of equipment
with which to explain and dignify their interventions. This, of course,
is nothing new. The alchemists of the middle ages and the witch doctors
of Africa realised that words and spells reeked of gods and sorcery and
so they created a secret and impenetrable structure of herbs, songs,
dance, rattling of special bones, chants and ceremonial incantations.
Today’s clinicians have much more sophisticated mumbo jumbo to offer.
They have laser surgery and psychotherapy, CAT scanners and serum
manganese assessments to substantiate their claims to be scientists. But
however good the impenetrable pseudoscience may sound or seem to be, and
however well based on scientific principles the equipments and the
techniques is still little more than mumbo jumbo. Doctors may use
scientific instruments but that doesn’t make them scientists any more
than a witch doctor would become a scientist if he wore a stethoscope
and danced around a microscope!“—-Dr Vernon Coleman
Medical students are further softened up by being maliciously fatigued.
The way to weaken a person’s will in order to mold him to suit your purposes is to
make him work hard, especially at night, and never give him a chance to recover. You teach
the rat to race. The result is a person too weak to resist the most debilitating
instrument medical school uses on its students: fear.
If I had to characterize doctors, I would say their major psychological attribute is fear.
They have a drive to achieve security-plus that’s never satisfied because of all the
fear that’s drummed into them in medical school: fear of failure, fear of missing a
diagnosis, fear of malpractice, fear of remarks by their peers, fear that they’ll
have to find honest work. There was a movie some time ago that opened with a marathon
dance contest. After a certain length of time all the contestants were eliminated except
one. Everybody had to fail except the winner. That’s what medical school has become.
Since everybody can’t win, everybody suffers from a loss of self-esteem. Everybody
comes out of medical school feeling bad.
Doctors are given one reward for swallowing the fear pill so
willingly and for sacrificing the healing instincts and human emotions that might help
their practice: arrogance. To hide their fear, they’re taught to adopt the
authoritarian attitude and demeanor of their professors. Confessions
of a Medical Heretic
“Doctors turn out to be dishonest, corrupt, unethical, sick, poorly educated,
and downright stupid more often than the rest of society. When I meet a doctor,
I generally figure I’m meeting a person who is narrowminded, prejudiced, and
fairly incapable of reasoning and deliberation. Few of the doctors I meet prove
my prediction wrong.” Confessions
of a Medical Heretic
“The admission tests and policies of medical schools virtually guarantee that
the students who get in will make poor doctors. The quantitative tests, the
Medical College Admission Test, and the reliance on grade point averages funnel
through a certain type of personality who is unable and unwilling to communicate
with people.” “Medical school does its best to turn smart students stupid,
honest students corrupt and healthy students sick. It isn’t very hard to turn a
smart student into a stupid one. First of all, the admissions people make sure
the professors will get weak-willed, authority-abiding students to work on. Then
they give them a curriculum that is absolutely meaningless as far as healing or
health are concerned.” Confessions
of a Medical Heretic
“I don’t advise anyone who has no symptoms to go to the doctor for a physical
examination. For people with symptoms, it’s not such a good idea, either. The
entire diagnostic procedure — from the moment you enter the office to the
moment you leave clutching a prescription or a referral appointment — is a
seldom useful ritual.” Confessions
of a Medical Heretic
Book: Simulations of God, The Science of Belief by Dr John Lilly)
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I’m Taking Back My Pussy! : A Transgression of Privatized Gynecological Boundaries
By Claire T. Porter, University of Memphis, Center for Research on Women
A My Turns Article
In this essay, I weave together my personal experiences “in the stirrups” with empirical evidence and theory on the medical maltreatment of women. I do not write this account with claims of authority or objectivity. Just as Lisa M. Tillman-Healy (1996, 78) takes readers into the secret world of bulimic young women by describing her own experiences with bulimia, I mean to take readers through “normal” gynecological procedures by describing my own experiences as a gynecological patient. I identify my embodied self as a locus of abuses done to women in the practice of modern medicine, rather than contriving a distance between my body and my thought process in privatized medical experiences. In writing this essay, I am informed by data that rest in my body-memory of being poked, prodded, scraped and ogled.
My analysis of the events described herein has evolved over time, from viewing my doctors’ behavior as acceptable to viewing it as abusive. Rethinking and reliving these events, I attend to what is often dismissed in social science writing: the way the body remembers. The tension I feel grow up through my thighs, buttocks, and pelvic floor, the tightening of my lower back (which compels me to jump up from my chair every few minutes and do the yogic “cat” stretch), the numbness that creeps into my crotch as I re-live memories of strangers’ eyes taking me in, and the eventual clench that freezes my jaw when I try to fathom why my doctors would not explain to me what would be happening to me under anesthetic are all omnipresent memory-sensations as I write. Thus, as I relive these events I rely on a methodological framework based on a process of privileging bodily knowledge in the process of creating an intellectual analysis.
Lying on the maroon vinyl examining table, with my behind hanging off the end and my feet elevated, stirrups apart, I feel a spinning sensation in my head. This scene is surreal. I want to hold onto something tightly. I want to shut my legs and never open them again. I want to giggle hysterically, flush red with embarrassment, and clamp my thighs shut. A strange man is looking at the most private and sensuous part of my body. The doctor is a thirty-something man with a degree from the University of Alabama. I can see his degree on the wall from where I lie. His eyes, which cut from side to side, make me nervous, add to the dizzy feeling in my head. As he attempts to stick the speculum in me, I unintentionally clench against the cold metal shoe horn. He repeats, “Stop tensing. Stop tensing.” His command only makes me tense harder. It is as if there is no opening “down there” at all, that he has to carve one out with that thing I am sure he keeps in the refrigerator. But he finally gets it in.
As he opens the speculum and my vagina, he says casually, “I saw you in that play y’all did over there at the college.” He puts something else in me that causes a disconcerting scraping sensation. I interject, “You mean ‘The Scarlett Pimpernell’?” “Yes. The one where you had to wear that old fashioned-dress.” My teeth are clenched in reaction to dull scraping. It is hard for me to have this conversation. “I mean, you looked gorgeous.” I can feel his breath in warm puffs on my thighs as he speaks. I think about how I had to tape up my breasts and then apply makeup to my cleavage so that they appeared to bulge out of the costume. He is going to be sadly disappointed when he does my breast exam. As he yanks the speculum out of me, leaving me feeling stretched and gooey with lubricant jelly, he tells me I have a cyst. I will have to have this cyst surgically removed, he says. The doctor explains, the same casual tone in his voice, that the surgeon will slice my abdomen open from pelvic bone to pelvic bone, get the thing out, and then do “exploratory” surgery in my uterus and ovaries. My head is spinning.
The exam is over, but I cannot shake the feeling of being exposed and vulnerable. I have used half a box of tissues to wipe away all the jelly from my genital area. Then I pull on my clothes fast. The doctor returns and invites me to sit on a chair beside a small desk. He launches into a list of appointments he has made for me at labs to get tests, something about a vaginal laproscopic exam, which I had never heard of. I interrupt his monologue to ask him what a vaginal laproscopy entails. He smirks, “A tube with a little camera in it will be inserted in your vagina … kind of like a penis.” At the word penis he blurts out a laugh. “Oh,” I say. I laugh to match his. He has to be my friend. My face feels oily under the vibrating fluorescent lights of his office, and I am unable to focus on any one object in the room … but I know I should be able to handle this. He just wants to make me feel comfortable, to have a sense of humor about this whole ordeal. He did not mean to make me feel embarrassed by the penis remark. I am just overly sensitive. It is not his fault that I am misinterpreting his comments. As I continue to watch his mouth move in a monologue about barium enemas, my face flushes darker until I feel like a vein in my right cheek may explode. I look at him. He has a reddish-brown tufted mustache and blotchy skin that makes me think first of rednecks. Then an image of Hitler comes to mind. Hatred erupts. The last thing I want is for him to know he has made me feel gross and even more exposed. This is my memory of my first gynecological exam.
The lived experiences that I have had in the gynecologic industry are far from rare. If one were to quantify experiences of medical abuse, to attempt to place on a scale from “bad” to “atrocious” my medical treatment, I do not believe that mine would score much beyond bad. The purpose of describing my own experiences “in the stirrups,” and subsequently in surgery, is not to present myself as a woman who has been mistreated in an unusual way. I suspect that thousands of women have been treated far worse. Such a scale would be contrary to the purpose of revealing such intimate and humiliating experiences. As with all types of abuse, competitions among individuals or groups to determine who has been abused the most and the worst derail the discussion and diminish more nuanced understandings about the nature of the abuse. Rather than attempting to quantify experiences of medical abuse, my purpose is to explore the methodological use of bodily experience as sociological inquiry.
Waves of humiliation surge up as I go through the process of writing, re-reading, re-writing, and so on, the above account of my first gynecological exam. I realize that I have involuntarily crossed my legs. As I write, read, re-think, and re-write how my doctor had to force the speculum into me, I involuntarily clench my pelvic muscles all over again. Why do I do this to myself? Further, why do I publicize this vulnerability and coerce readers to participate in my memory, to relive it, too? And finally, why deny readers distance by writing in a present, active tense, pulling them into the immediacy of the examination? I detail these experiences using the theoretical framework of emotional sociology (Ellis and Bochner 1996, 99). My goal, by writing and reliving these experiences, is to create an atmosphere where the voice of the body is privileged and central rather than dismissed from the discourse. If the voice of the body becomes central to informing analytical, theoretical stances, then practices that are experienced as violations of the body are recognizable as problematic and unjust, and hence in need of repair.
In publicizing the personal in this essay I also follow the Black feminist theoretical principle discussed by bell hooks and Tanya McKinnon (1996, 36), who state that it is a necessary act of transgression of institutionalized power to talk in the open about private, taboo, and “unspeakable” experiences, even if doing so requires a sacrifice of privacy. hooks and McKinnon assert that activist-oriented theoretical frameworks develop when privatized abuses are publicized. They state, “The ways in which privacy is constructed and the meaning of public and private legitimize and uphold structures of domination, particularly sexism” (822). Thus, writing about what happened to me in the private space of an OB/GYN office can transgress the institutional protection that this space is afforded in society. The exploitation of women has been commonplace in the gynecological and obstetrics industries for several hundred years (Raymond, 1993, 37). In that sense, the speculum can be viewed as an instrument meant to colonize the female reproductive tract.
It still drives me nuts that I did not kick that gynecologist in the face for objectifying me when his hands were all over my pubic area. It would have been unacceptable in our androcentric, heterosexist culture for a male or female doctor, in the midst of examining a man’s penis, to comment on how “gorgeous” he looked during a sporting event. I feel a wave of guilt as I think of my own harsh reaction to my mother when she described to me a gynecologist who, she explained, “tried to turn me on with his hand” during an exam. I had turned on her, asking, “Why didn’t you do anything?” She had responded, “I told him ‘that’s enough’.” I had frowned at her, believing her to be weak, even flaky, to let herself be taken advantage of that way. But after my own experience, I can understand perfectly why just that verbal rebuke was difficult for her to muster, and actually showed her bravery. I am suddenly overcome with depression at the way mom and I and most other women are made to feel, like control of our own bodies is impossible in the presence of authoritative doctors, who supposedly know us better than we know ourselves.
It is the morning of my operation. A white gown replaces my clothes. Mom helps me get it on, ties the strings in the back. I am disoriented by having had to take out my contacts and by all the people walking around me while my behind is exposed. I ask several nurses why I have to take off my bra if the surgery is all the way “down there.” They all say the same things: “You just have to. It’s standard policy.” Then, without warning the nurse sticks me in the behind with a needle. I yip and then turn red. She says “sorry” in a flat voice and fades away into the blur of people and voices. I call after her to ask what the shot is for. She says it’s the anaesthetic for the surgery. Mom tells me what a piece of cake this will be, that I’ll be out in no time. People and voices are getting swirled into a syrupy mess. The shot must be putting me under. Then an African-American man in white smiles close to my face and says jauntily, “She’s ready to Go!” He is pulling me along. I hear the click of mom’s heels and the man humming and the rush of the wind over my face as the cart rolls along. All in slow motion. Then, I am in another room with two women in white, who lift me onto a table. Oh my God, they’re about to operate but the shot did not work! I am not under yet! I hear a buzzing whir sound. It sounds like a circular saw. I struggle but my body has turned into inert pudding. I manage to move my mouth, strange sounds coming out.
I repeat to the two women, “Wait! I’m not under yet! I’m not under yet!” They are both laughing in big snorts and cackles, lifting up my gown. I struggle to get away from the buzzing whir and their laughing. Everything is swirling and twirling together, and I fall away.
Muffled voices are calling my name. I am at the bottom of the lake in Pocono, and my mom’s side of the family, decked out in absurdly bright cocktail attire, are calling me from the water’s edge. That must be why they sound blurred and sluggish. It is so nice and warm down here, but they must want me to swim in to shore. That bright light up there is getting brighter and brighter … I burst through to the light, and moan. I want to vomit. I feel a slicing, throbbing pain in my stomach. A large picture window streams in morning light, white washing the bed I am lying in. So many people, I cannot focus on any one. Is it morning? Where’s Roger? I want to hold his hand and sob, it hurts so bad. Women in white are talking to me: “Claire, you can push this button whenever it hurts, and pain killers will go though the tube into your arm.” Somehow, my hand has traveled to the little red button with the speed of light and my index finger clicks it over and over again. Pain is mixed with confusion and the frustration of not being able to control my body. I fall back into the warm water.
This time, I fight the swim up to the light. Up there is pain. But a current is sucking me upwards. Exhausted, I let it whisk me up. My mom and a nurse are talking to me as I try to make it three feet to the toilet. Every time I lift my leg off the floor, a searing pain strikes my abdomen. The nurse is lecturing me, “…and how well you heal now will determine how well you do with your pregnancies.” I manage a grin here. She assumes I will be having babies. It is a given. I have a womb, therefore I will have babies. Their serious faces both seem silly, verging on absurd. I let out a too-loud giggle and then snort- laugh at their perturbed faces.
A week has gone by since my operation. My mother takes me to the surgeon’s examining table in Atlanta. The nurse comes in to “prep” me, and drapes a white sheet over my bare below-the-waist region. When the doctor comes through the door, a young man in a similar white lab coat is at his side. He whips off the sheet as a magician pulls the tablecloth from beneath the plates, while saying only “hello” to me, with no eye contact. The young resident does not make eye contact with me, but I see his eyes wandering over my whole body. I know that look. I feed off that look. He wants me. I feel a rush of adrenaline. He thinks I am pretty, maybe even beautiful. I could seduce him, make him beg… This is sick. He knows nothing about me. He does not know me, but he wants me? How dare he just peruse my naked body, appraising me like a luxury car he wants to test drive. Do I even matter? Do I even exist except as a body?!
“Closely connected with the absence of self is the dispensing of existence experienced by women… Women undergoing these procedures report a sense of nonbeing” (Raymond 1993, xv). I cannot help feeling that my body, especially the most private areas of it, has been taken away from me. This surgeon and the horny resident both assess my pubic area. Now the vision of my genitals is held in their brains. I feel I possess my sex less and less and feel them both smug in the fact that they own it. What a power trip for them. Bastards.
A hilariously out of place image pops into my mind as I lie there being examined: I am in a Wonder Woman costume standing beside me as I lie on the table. I throw my golden lasso over my stolen pelvis, announcing valiantly, “I’m taking back my pussy!” I try to hold onto the power of this fantasy, that I am not only the prone me on the table but also a “Wonder Me” who can save myself, but it seems to escape me almost as soon as I imagine it. I have that achy feeling circling the rims of my eyes that means my body wants me to cry. But I am too disconnected. To cry, I have to feel truly righteous in the knowledge that I am wronged. How can I feel that I am wronged by the renowned surgeon and his assistant who have saved my womb? They are doctors, and doctors do not harm; they heal. That is the whole point. So none of my body’s aches or my sense of bodily dispossession is even worth entertaining. These are unjustifiable feelings. So I shut them down and float with the sense of nothingness.
Tracing my scar, which grins along the border of my now growing-back-in pubic hair, with his ungloved index finger, my surgeon says to the resident at his side, “Would you look at that? It’s healing perfectly. Practically imperceptible.” He smiles up at me then. “You’ll be able to look just as good in bikinis.”
“Doctors add to the exposure, often by making comments that promote the sexual objectification of the experience for the woman” (Raymond 1993, 37).
My surgeon then turns to the intern without covering me back up. They speak about the importance of certain procedures. The nurse stands by frowning at them and then at me. After what seems like forever, she covers me with the sheet, snapping it out over me so that it billows. As she does this, she glowers at the two doctors. They remain oblivious, still talking about procedures. The nurse’s obvious disgust for the doctors’ disregard for my privacy gives me a jolt of indignation. I want to scream, “I don’t wear bikinis, asshole. Why don’t you try to swim in that shit!” But I feel so exposed and powerless, that if I open my mouth, my voice will be sucked away in that antiseptic white void.
Making women sexually attractive to men and willing and able to bear children are the two pinnacles of a “spermatic economy,” according to G.J. Barker-Benfield (1976 13). In the logic of the “spermatic economy,” women exist for sex: as sex objects and/or breeders (cited in Raymond 1993, 34). Thus, what was relevant to my doctors was that they had “healed” me well so that I could still make babies and would still be attractive to men (e. g., I could still wear bikinis without my scar showing).
Four years after my first exam and subsequent surgery, I have just finished a pelvic exam with a woman gynecologist. By virtue of her gender, I am told she will transform the exam into an empowering experience. It does not seem that different, though. I am still on my back while procedures are performed on my body as though I am an object. Afterwards, she invites me to sit down and talk. Perhaps this is where the empowerment will come. She wants to engage in a dialogue with me.
She starts the dialogue by asserting that she wants very much to put me on “the pill.” She is already scribbling out a prescription. I tell her she need not bother, that birth control pills affect every organ of the body, and that they have not been around long enough for anyone to know what the long term side effects are. She frowns and says, “But he must be sick and tired of using condoms”. “Well, I’m not,” I respond curtly. Why is it always so much easier to be curt to a woman in authority than a man?
She backs off, still frowning, and begins to look through my medical history, lying in a yellow folder. “Oh. You had an ectopic pregnancy when you were eighteen?” She sounds mildly surprised. “No, but I had a cyst removed then.” “An ectopic pregnancy is a kind of cyst. Didn’t they tell you?” she asks, with what sounds like a lilt of pity in her voice. I bristle. “I must have just forgotten it was that kind of cyst.” I reply. The light-headed, vulnerable feeling has returned, as I am transported back to my first pelvic exam. I cannot really hear anything she says to me after this. I just keep thinking about the two words: “ectopic” and “pregnancy.” I hate her all of a sudden, this bitch who wants to show up my ignorance. Who pretends that she is different just because she is a woman. And I hate myself for ever having believed that it would be different, for daring to hope that it could be, for putting myself in such a vulnerable position.
It is weeks before I can comprehend that, at the time of my surgery, the doctors must have chosen not to tell me that I had an ectopic pregnancy. Were they trying to protect me from being embarrassed, since to have an ectopic pregnancy was proof that I was sexually active? My embarrassment never seemed to have been a concern of theirs at other humiliating medical moments. Or, did they just figure that I did not need to know the technical details of why I was being sliced open? Maybe they arrogantly assumed it would be way over my head. Even worse, had my parents also known, but complied with the doctors in not explaining to me? Then comes rushing in the strange knowledge that I had been pregnant, that a fetus had lived inside me, if only for a few days, and that it had somehow made a mistake in navigation. I felt sad for that ball of energy that had some fleeting existence in me, and was then cut out and incinerated.
I am not a distanced sociologist discussing the pervasive maltreatment of women in the medical industry. Rather, I am a woman who is sometimes still humiliated by this dehumanizing treatment. I wonder if medical reform is possible. What I do believe is that transgressing the boundaries of the public with the protected privacy of the medical establishment, as advocated by hooks with McKinnon (1996), holds promise as a route to eroding the protected power of the medical establishment.
References
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source: link
Yahoogroup
If you are a woman that wonders if things could be done differently at the gynecologist’s office, then this may be just the group for you.
We are a group critical of the highly valued pelvic exam in this society as we do not believe that womanhood is a disease.
Eventhough there are already since years non-invasive, more accurate alternatives (like the CSA bloodtest) invented to check for the HPV virus, these tests are never being offered to women. In the meanwhile women are still placed in the stirrups and left behind in the dark about these innovative tests that could spare them the unnecessary humilation.
That’s why we want to offer women more information about the choices they can make that are truly benefitting their health by exchanging articles/websites on the subject that increase our awareness of existing alternatives and scientific facts about gynecological matters.
The group also aims to make women feel secure and selfconfident again of their bodies, instead of being afraid of it. Several women have thanked us before because they gained so much more selfconfidence over their bodies and will no longer tolerate their bodies to be violated in the name of science.
click logo to join Women Against Stirrups
Woman, Healthy By Nature 