My girlfriend was looking to get a new IUD after her last one was expiring. For some reason the normal approach is completely without anaesthesia. There are so many horror stories of women being in awful pain during and up to weeks after the procedure. She looked around for a gynecologist with a focus on contraception (most focus on conception which is kind of annoying if you’re not at that stage in life yet) and we were able to find one. He said there’s no reason to not be using local anaesthesia. The procedure was very simple. Unbelievable how many women are going through pain that would be entirely preventable.
Wait so if its local anesthesia does that men your girlfriend had an injection into her cervix directly?? Because the idea of that makes me want to scream.
Yes. But the alternative is to feel the IUD penetrate the cervix and then hook into the uterus. And if youre getting a replacement, like was the case for her, you get to go through all of that backwards beforehand as well. It makes a prick from a syringe (although painful) seem pretty good by comparison.
Are there no female gynecologists?
You’d kinda need to be a female gynecological researcher w clout, and then maybe like 40 years after you demonstrate a need for a new technique, it might start to catch on.
I would imagine that tolerating the pain was beaten into women for so long that at this point it would be futile to try to change it because they would be shamed and seen as weak.
There was a documented case of a nurse stealing pain medication and injecting women with saline to cover for it and it took years for her to be caught because no one believed the women who said they were in pain. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/podcasts/serial-the-retrievals-yale-fertility-clinic.html
