Not in case the patient says she's pregnant.
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You do know of the concept that women can be pregnant without them realizing or without them acknowledging it?
It's like asking someone whether they have worms. They might know, but they might also not know. They might even know and not tell you.
All of that can be circumvented with a different question.
So you can choose to be offended by a question that they are actually legally required to ask, or you can understand that the main purpose of a doctor (or other medical personell) is not polite dinner conversation but actually assessing the situation to give appropriate treatment.
I only had one instructor out of my maybe 10 or so said to check to make sure the patient can physically get pregnant before you assume that is the issues
I know at least one woman who physically couldn't get pregnant until she got pregnant.
She hat ovary cancer and they removed one and a half ovaries. It was determined that the remaining ovary was too damaged to still produce any eggs. She had eggs frozen before the operation, and she and her husband used all of them up in IVF, none worked.
They then gave up and adopted a kid, and a few years later a second one. Right after they adopted the second one as a newborn, she got pregnant. Apparently, they stopped using contraception because couldn't get pregnant anyway. Now they have two kids under the age of 1.
She totally would have told any medical professional that she physically couldn't get pregnant, until she did.
I think there is the misconception that patients have, that they expect doctors and other medical staff to be polite.
They are not there to be polite, they are there to fix a problem.
In regular situations it's wildly impolite to ask a woman whether she's pregnant, especially if she's not. But a doctor needs that information, so it would be quite smart if people would just get over themselves and understand that they will be asked a few impolite questions when talking to medical staff.
Reminds me of the one time one of our sales people video called me with an urgent bug report that his demo unit wasn't responding via SSH or HTTP and that it's probably broken because of our last update and whatnot.
I asked him if he checked the power and network cables. He gets angry and tells me that of course the cables are ok.
So I ask him if it's the unit I can see on the shelf behind him. He says yes. I say, "All the LEDs on the front of the unit are off. Are you sure the power cable is plugged in?". It wasn't.
This is the doctor equivalent of that video call.
Not every time it's the simple answer. But sometimes it is, so you ask the simple question every time.
If the fetus dies, that's one thing. If the fetus gets deformed due to medication, that's another thing and the one suffering from that is not the woman, hence it's not only her business.
To put it differently: If you could heal a severely disabled child by peeing in to a cup, would you not do it?
Yeah, that comic is pretty badly written, jumbling together to many things to make a clear point while using extreme hyperbole to obfuscate its actual meaning even more.
Tbh, doctors (like anyone working any job) tend to fall into a pattern-matching routine quite often. My son has a chronic condition that required quite a few hospital stays over his life. Even though my son is not a woman and doesn't get periods, there have been quite a few situations where doctors didn't take him or us (both my wife and me) serious and/or were stuck in automatic mode.
One example (of many): We are in hospital, my son is there as an inpatient. He was maybe a year old at this time and sleeping in his bed. Nurse comes in and routinely checks his temperature with a forehead thermometer. It reads as 42°C (107.6°F) and the nurse panics and immediately sprints out of the room to get temperature reducing medicine. While she's gone I touch his forehead and it doesn't even remotely feel warm. I take the thermometer and check the temperature a few times and it always reads as 37°C (98.6°F) every time, so totally fine. She comes back with a syringe filled with medicine and I say "Stop, he doesn't have high temperature". She ignores me and moves to inject the medicine anyway, and I quickly pull out the thermometer to show her the temperature, telling her again to stop. Finally she relents and agrees to check the temperature again, which she does a few times and realizes he doesn't have any fever after all.
Turns out, my son was hooked up to pre-heated oxygen, and apparently when she first took his temperature, she must have accidentally touched the oxygen hose with the thermometer, and the oxygen hose is preheated to 42°C.
I have numerous similar stories.
(That's not to say that this problem doesn't affect women more, but that the underlying problem is a human problem, not an anti-women problem. Women have more complex physiology, so it does make sense that they are a victim of something like that more often. But the underlying issue is not that doctors hate/dismiss women, but that doctors dismiss everyone whenever they have a plausible chance to do so. With issues like that it's important to focus on the actual problem at hand, because that usually has a different and better solution.)
Looks like you misunderstood both the comic and the person you reacted to. Neither one is actually about a woman getting shot in the arm, that's just hyperbole for comedic effect.
This is about this question being asked in all sorts of situations and conditions where the doctor asks about pregnancy status before administering treatment.
It's got a reckognizable name and first party support from an actual company.
This.
The one step that would really push a lot would be if you can go to your local electronics store and buy a PC there with Linux preinstalled and completely setup, just like you can with Windows, Mac and ChromeOS.
That's why the Steam Deck actually pushed the Linux market share quite a bit.
I mean, there is a thing like that and it's called Chromebooks, but we, the tech people, deemed ChromeOS not Linux enough and told everyone not to buy chromebooks.
But still ChromeOS is by far the most popular Linux distro with about 5x the market share of the next most popular Linux distro (which is Arch, thanks to the Steam Deck).
Really difficult to actually get good numbers here since there's a ton of sampling bias and user agent strings (which are used for most of these market share detectors) don't capture Linux distros apart from ChromeOS.
But we can combine sources to get somewhere.
The Steam Hardware and Software Survey doesn't include any data on ChromeOS, because there's no Steam on ChromeOS, but it says that there's a total market share for Linux of 3.2% with the most common Linux Distro being Arch with a market share of 0.32% (probably due to the Steam Deck), followed by Mint with 0.24%.
So double the maket share to get roughly to the 6.3% total Linux maket share from PH, and we get Arch with 0.64% and Mint with 0.48%, which is both much much lower than the 2.4% of ChromeOS on PH.
Yeah, it was a political decision, not one based on how well the Linux transition worked.
They used Linux for quite some time productively. It wasn't a failed transition at all.
That’s interesting about the 16 bit SPI memory. I thought that SPI was usually a 1-bit interface though SDIO is, I believe, 4 bits wide. 16 bits at 80mhz is fast enough for 2nd level memory. Maybe they can start putting MMU’s into those processors.
SPI is originally specified as 1-bit interface, but it can just be extended by multiplying the data lines. So originally you have MISO, MOSI, SCK and SS. Keep SS and SCK as is, but run 16 lines of MISO and MOSI, and you have 16-bit parallel SPI.
Maybe they can start putting MMU’s into those processors.
That would be the point when Linux on ESP32 would emerge.
Yeah the ESP32-C3 is an amazing value but way overkill for a flashlight, in terms of package size and power consumption in addition to cost. I wonder whether the BLE can communicate with a phone held near the flashlight though, if the flashlight is a metal tube that would block most of the RF. There might be a non-metallic path out the front, through the PCB, leds, and optics.
I sadly have no experience with RF, so I can't say anything about that.
Packed together with "Poor people are subhumans and are supposed to suffer".
Well, all Linux distros combined are more than ChromeOS. If you split up by distro, ChromeOS is still the top Linux distro by far.
Successful compared to what? I don't have data, but I'd venture to say that it's the most popular desktop Linux distro.
It's a bit past its peak, but in 2023 it had 7% market share in the quite lucrative North American market. That's not nothing. In North America, all other Linux distros combined just overtook ChromeOS this year. World-wide it was last year.
There's also no other Linux distro that comes pre-installed on devices from different manufacturers (at least none that I know of).
If you look at the commercially successful variants of Linux (ChromeOS and Android), you'll see that taking away freedom/choice was the first thing they did.
And ultimately, if you are targeting the mass market, that's almost required.
If a doctor doesn't ask and it turns out the patient is pregnant and the treatment harms the embryo, the doctor is liable for the damages. If she or he doesn't want to be liable, she or he needs to ask the question.
I know someone who had her ovaries removed and was sure she couldn't get pregnant anymore. Turns out, for some reason the ovary removal wasn't complete, a small scrap of ovary was missed, and she got pregnant.
Also it sadly does totally happen that women have had intercourse without them realizing. Look up e.g. Gisèle Pelicot.
And lastly, ask how many women are positive that their contraception is in place and working perfectly and can surely never get pregnant but who still end up getting pregnant.
There are women who carry a baby to completion and only realize at birth that they happened to be pregnant for a full 9 months.
Yes, most women know their own bodies. But some do not. And as a doctor not asking is about as smart as putting your hand into a random strangers dogs mouth because most dogs are well-trained and will not bite your hand off.