Sunday, September 21, 2008

Things They Should Invent: post on the CPSO website which doctors refuse to provide which services

Apparently doctors have or might have the right to refuse to provide medical treatments based on their own religious beliefs.

I'm still wondering a) do any other professions have this as a capital R Right? and b) since there are so many specializations in medicine, why not just specialize in something that is completely unrelated to the areas where your beliefs limit you? If you believe birth control pills are inethical, why become a family doctor (which is most people's #1 stop for their contraception needs?) Why not become a podiatrist or an ear nose and throat specialist instead?

But if they are going to do that, they should save everyone time and hassle and give us all fair warning by posting in the doctor's profile on the CPSO website which services and procedures they refuse to provide. For example, what I want out of my family doctor (the reason I even bothered to go to the trouble of finding a family doctor in the first place) is contraception. If I go through the CPSO directory finding someone who's taking new patients, schedule an appointment, wait for the appointment, take time off work, wait in the waiting room because they're running an hour behind as usual, go in and talk to the doctor and THEN find they won't give me contraception, I've wasted a shitload of my time and gotten really pissed off, in addition to wasting the doctor's time and the receptionist's time and inconveniencing my work and making the people in line behind me in the waiting room wait marginally longer. It would be a lot easier for everyone if I could just see on the website that they won't give me contraception, so I can rule them out and scroll down to the next one.

The doctors shouldn't object to this, unless their goal is to make it more difficult for people to get contraception by sending them on wild goose chases (in which case they shouldn't be practising medicine and should probably undergo some kind of psychiatric evaluation). Doctors will still get patients whose ethics jive with their own (for example, I would happily go to a doctor who refuses to provide artificial conception because I think it's morally wrong too, and I'd go to a doctor who refuses to provide, like, circumcision because it's way irrelevant to me). If the doctor can't find enough patients because of their religious restrictions, then maybe that's a sign that they should be in another profession, or at least another specialization.

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