Suffering Shouldn ’ t Be a Normal Part of Womanhood

One of the most important lessons medical schools teach is one my mom mastered as a teenager left to fill her own mother’s shoes: how to figure out who is really sick and needs immediate attention and who can wait (or what we in the medical field call “triage”). Nothing I learned in med school or since has contradicted what I learned at Bertha’s knee. At the time, the practice of medicine was rudimentary—and that’s putting it nicely. So, the diagnoses typically made at home were probably not that different from those of a bona fide doctor. The more serious common ailments were things like dropsy (now known as “swelling” or “edema,” due to congestive heart failure); consumption (used to describe any disease that seemed to consume the body, like tuberculosis); weak hearts (for people who tired easily or had fainting spells due to congestive heart failure); and “fits” (which could apply to anything from seizures to strokes). These were terms my mother and aunties still used when I was a child, although I had no idea what they were talking about. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] I had 12 years of training to become an OB/GYN and have benefited from some outstanding teachers and colleagues. But I still stand in unmatched awe of my mother’s incredible gifts as a diagnostician. As big and boisterous as our brood was, no family doctor or pediatrician ever saw our family on a regular ba...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized health Source Type: news