Haha, your neighbours in the Emerald Isle here. Our patients are sue happy over here, using American standards when they're funded by the Irish system, not over here they don't. Unless it's in the medical chart that they had an operation to remove a uterus, I'm doing a pregnancy test on a patient. A doctor here asked a patient if they were sexually active, they said no because "I'm too young in my culture to have sex"... BOOM pregnant. There are also reasons why they won't admit their history, such as a parent or guardian being present when being asked those, we do a pregnancy test anyway. We are lied to all the time or it may not be a good time that a patient tells us their medical history, but things like a pregnancy test is a blanket test for child bearing women here, unless it's medically stated you don't do one.
That's really interesting. Based on some of the answers from US peeps about how it likely stems from their different cultural/legal attitudes to abortion/foetal harm for them, do you think that either the tendency to lie or the tendency for doctors to be more worried about lying stems from Irelands history with the same issue?
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u/somedelightfulmoron Aug 01 '26
Haha, your neighbours in the Emerald Isle here. Our patients are sue happy over here, using American standards when they're funded by the Irish system, not over here they don't. Unless it's in the medical chart that they had an operation to remove a uterus, I'm doing a pregnancy test on a patient. A doctor here asked a patient if they were sexually active, they said no because "I'm too young in my culture to have sex"... BOOM pregnant. There are also reasons why they won't admit their history, such as a parent or guardian being present when being asked those, we do a pregnancy test anyway. We are lied to all the time or it may not be a good time that a patient tells us their medical history, but things like a pregnancy test is a blanket test for child bearing women here, unless it's medically stated you don't do one.