I was previously trying to write an analogy about why unwanted fertility isn't part of health. My shower gave me an idea, which still isn't as perfect as I'd like but I'm blogging for the record.
Imagine you have a big, ugly mole. You hate it and wish it wasn't there.
However, you live in a society that thinks beauty marks are attractive.
You've made inquiries about the possibility of getting your big ugly mole removed, but you get a lot of push-back (and some doctors outright refuse to do it) because there are a lot of people in your society who put a lot of time and effort and resources and emotional drama into getting plastic surgeons to give them beauty marks.
On top of all this, your mole has all the characteristics of a cancerous mole. Unfortunately, your society doesn't have the ability to detect cancer before it starts metastasizing so you have no way of proving or disproving that your big ugly mole is cancerous, but it does have all the characteristics.
Now, within this context, suppose you have to get surgery in the general vicinity of you big ugly mole. You ask the doctors if they can remove the mole while they're doing surgery in that area, but they refuse. You try to emphasize to them that you don't like the mole and don't want the mole, but they are not swayed. You beg them to, at the very least, not prioritize saving the mole - to give you the most effective surgery without regard for whether the mole is lost, but they still take specific measures to save it despite your protests. And, perhaps, their efforts to save the mole result in a suboptimal approach to the surgery as a whole.
And when you complain about this, people tell you "He's just looking out for your health!"
3 comments:
I think the mole and the fertility issues are both health. But I think you should be able to take care of your own health as you see fit. You're an adult.
The origin of this analogy was an conversation where people were commiserating about medical professionals who insist on taking specific measures to protect your fertility even though you don't want to be fertile, even at the expense of aspects of your health that you do want to protect. (Example: the mammogram technician who put a lead apron over my reproductive organs because I'm still of childbearing age, then told me to lean my unprotected head closer to the machine.)
Some people kept barging in on the conversation and arguing "But he's just looking out for your health!" and couldn't be effectively persuaded that unwanted fertility is part of the "your health" that they are allegedly looking out for. So I've been trying to analogize it.
Obviously I need to continue refining it if that isn't clear.
Update: I realized it's not the analogy that needs refining but the title, so I've reposted this analogy under the title "Analogy for why preserving unwanted fertility isn't caring for the patient's health".
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