Lori Boyer couldn’t stop trembling as she sat on the examining table, hugging her hospital gown around her. Her mind was reeling. She’d been raped hours earlier by a man she knew - a man who had assured Boyer, 35, that he only wanted to hang out at his place and talk. Instead, he had thrown her onto his bed and assaulted her. ‘I’m done with you,’ he’d tonelessly told her afterward. Boyer had grabbed her clothes and dashed for her car in the freezing predawn darkness. Yet she’d had the clarity to drive straight to the nearest emergency room - Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon, Pennsylvania - to ask for a rape kit and talk to a sexual assault counselor. Bruised and in pain, she grimaced through the pelvic exam. Now, as Boyer watched Martin Gish, M.D., jot some final notes into her chart, she thought of something the rape counselor had mentioned earlier. ‘I’ll need the morning-after pill,’ she told him. Dr. Gish looked up. He was a trim, middle-aged man with graying hair and, Boyer thought, an aloof manner. ‘No,’ Boyer says he replied abruptly. ‘I can’t do that.’ He turned back to his writing. […]
Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
Doctors’ Beliefs Hinder Patient Care
Author: SABRINA RUBIN ERDELY
Source: SELF/MSNBC
Publication Date: 2:26 p.m. ET June 22, 2007
Link: Doctors’ Beliefs Hinder Patient Care
Source: SELF/MSNBC
Publication Date: 2:26 p.m. ET June 22, 2007
Link: Doctors’ Beliefs Hinder Patient Care
Stephan: Iny my view a physician who can be proved to have failed to provide a woman with legal medical treatment when she requests it should lose his or her license. Period. Full stop. One strike, you're out.