Originally posted on Tumblr.
Today my newspaper writes about how the DF’ers (That’s the Danish People’s Party – bunch of racist fucks) think that every hospital patient should have the right to refuse treatment by woman wearing a traditional muslim headscarf, and if not possible in that hospital, should have the right to be transferred to another.
We do, in fact, have free choice of hospitals here in DK. We can always refuse to be treated, and we can always request to be transferred, though there’s no guarantee another hospital will have room, everywhere is notoriously understaffed. This is public healthcare. And now they’re making a fuss about one of their party members having to accept treatment from a muslim doctor wearing a headscarf. Oh the horror!
This pisses me off to no end.
Not so much that these racist fucks want nothing to do with muslims – I’m pretty sure most muslims would prefer to have nothing to do with these hateful people, anyway – but that they would actually waste public resources on administration and transfers of patients in our already heavily overloaded health care system.
I go to the hospital regularly for sessions with a shrink. She’s supposed to help me with my disability – autism – and help me develop tools to manage my everyday life. She cannot do this, because she has never worked with autistics before, and therefore has some serious problems coming up with anything that I haven’t already read in the textbooks myself.
In the past 1½ years I have requested to be sent to someone else, either within this hospital or in another hospital, who knows and has experience with autistic patients.
They have refused every fucking time. They apparently have no one.
I happen to know that they have a resident fucking expert in this very hospital. But no one there has ever mentioned his existence at all, nor acknowledged that it might be in my best interest to see someone with some experience in this field.
No, I can be allowed to see a shrink who’s read the same texts I have, and that’s fucking it. And they refuse to transfer my out-patient ‘treatment’ to another hospital. It’s not even like I’d need a fucking ride. They would just need to arrange for an appointment to be made. They wouldn’t even need to mail my records, as they’re already digitized to my social security number and available from all the country’s hospitals – just in case I might be injured while far away from home. This is how public healthcare works.
There’s no fucking administration in transferring an outpatient who can transport herself to and from appointments. But no. I still get a no, even to see the resident expert which would not even require a hospital transfer, merely an internal one.
And now these sitty racist fucks raise a shitstorm about someone’s rights to be transferred because their fucking Islamophobic sensibilities are harmed by being TREATED FOR DISEASES OR INJURIES by muslim doctors!!!
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?!?!?!?
And here I thought doctors helped people. That sometimes – even most of the time – they cure people. And that this goes whether the doctor is Christian, Muslim, Atheist, Buddhist or whatever the fuck the doc is.
ARGH!
Some of us with actual real health problems and/or functionality problems (my health is fine – though right now my blood pressure is probably suspiciously high grrrrrr) need transfers for health reasons! Do you know what that is? Health reasons? They are factors that, if not taken into account, damage your actual health – physical or mental, or at least cause a lack of improvement.
And you fucking bigots are worried that you might be treated by a muslim doctor.
No, let me rephrase that, because it was clarified in the article, it is not being treated by a muslim doctor that is the problem. It is being treated by a muslim doctor, who wears a headscarf, because of what this headscarf symbolizes: “intolerance and subjugation” according to these asshats.
Yes, I can see how very intolerant and utterly subjugated these women must be to study hard to become doctors and to then work hard to get good jobs, and pay a fucking shitload of taxes, while working in a place where they will have to treat a bunch of thankless bigots, who would rather see them put on a plane and dumped over their own country without a parasuit (yes, someone actually said that a few years back), than be touched by their scarf-wearing selves.
Yes, I can clearly see how these women are intolerant and subjugated to the max.
And it would all be allright if these women did not wear scarves.
Seriously. That’s what they’re saying. They would feel perfectly fine being treated by muslim doctors without headscarves.
As if I’ll actually believe that.
No, I imagine they would just move on to the next physical hint that the doctor (or nurses - imagine it goes for nurses as well) is of the Islamic persuasion and then demand that to be outlawed, or demand that the hospital use precious resources on removing the patient from such an offensive display of religion.
Technically we all have the right to refuse treatment by a doctor we do not feel safe with. And we all know what will happen to doctors whose patients continuously request to be transferred to someone else. That doc will lose hir job.
So this demand for treatment devoid of religious symbols is, in effect, just a ploy to make sure that muslim doctors get fired.
The Danish Doctor’s Association is backing their muslim members, of course, saying that the patients’ main concerns ought to be the doctors’ skills rather than the state of their hair. And one of their representatives said to the newspaper that it was, in fact, a fairly good thing to be treated by a doctor wearing a head-covering of some sort – especially if you’re hospitalised for something that will have lowered your immune resistances – as the headscarves are actually more hygienic than uncovered hair.
And while the rest of us hospital users are still fighting to receive competent treatment (honestly, my situation is similar to having an orthopedic surgeon treating allergies – it’s nonsensical), some exemplary and competent doctors are vilified and problematized simply, because a few racist and Islamophobic fucks don’t want to be cured and/or stitched up by people who do not share their views.
Yuck, I say.
Let them go home without a cure, then, and leave room and time in the doctors’ busy schedules for the rest of us, who will be grateful to be kept alive/taken care of/cured/put back together, even if our world-views are not the same.
/end rant
That did help a little with the rage. Now I just wish I knew what to do about this shit.
Filed under: Autism, Entitlement Issues, Health care, Racism, Women at Work, Women of Colour
