Why didn't you say so?

[u/TheNectarineDiaries]

Best medical advice I ever got was to bring a man to your appointments

[u/rikaateabug]

I'll never forget when I was 19 and went to the doctor for a quarter-sized ulcer that appeared in my mouth overnight. He shoved his finger in there and poked at it (painfully), then asked how long I'd had oral herpes. When I tried to explain that I'd never done anything like that, he all but called me a liar and told me to just use a peroxide rinse.

It wasn't until a few days later that I found out this could be a side effect of the birth control pills I'd recently started taking. One would think I learned this from the OBGYN (who prescribed the pills and I'd spoken to since), but no, it was my dentist.  He was so kind too He prescribed me an oral rinse for pain and even checked in with my OB to ask questions about things I was unsure of. As soon as I stopped taking the pills it went away.

I'm grateful my dentist was willing to help me out, but t he way doctors treat women--especially young women--is so fucked up. I've since switched to all women doctors and a NP for a PCP. I think that's been pretty helpful (same great dentist though!).

[u/Knotted_Hole69 → u/rikaateabug]

I have a disease that causes those ulcers non stop, 24/7 and doctors always say oh this is bad herpes simplex! Then they google the disease and say “oh”

Herpes sucks but it doesnt cause quarter sized ulcers and they should know that.

[u/Fuzzy-Assumption8516 → u/rikaateabug]

My partner recently went to the hospital for mouth pain and lumps on their gums. We were taken back and kept for a few hours, during which they took bloods and my partner’s face started to swell like a balloon. A doctor looked in their mouth for less than thirty seconds and said it was an ulcer, and to use a specific mouthwash to treat it. We went home and not eight hours later we went back because the pain got unbearable, the guy who triaged them basically told us to go home because it was nothing earlier even though it had clearly gotten worse. We were in the waiting room for probably seven hours, during which they took bloods again. Their veins were difficult to find because they hadn’t been able to drink anything all day because of the pain and now the swelling keeping their mouth shut. They eventually got taken back again and we were informed that it was not, in fact, an ulcer, but instead it was a serious infection from an improperly-filled cavity four months ago. This was a surprise, because they had been through similar, less intense pain in the same area around the time the cavity was filled, and the dentist refused to even look at it. They were given emergency treatment and antibiotics, and we now have to schedule an urgent dentist appointment to get the tooth removed. If we had listened to the first doctor, their mouth could have gotten septic. If the dentist had bothered to check way back at the beginning, none of this would have happened. We have reported as many people as we could, and we are looking into potential lawsuits, but I doubt anything will happen. So many people in the medical field would rather let patients suffer and possibly die than actually do their job.