44 Comments

She can wait for her EKG until a woman technician comes in. That will be in October.

Her lawyer is claiming discrimination by the hospital. But someone help me out here. Isn’t SHE the one who who is guilty of discrimination? After all, she is refusing to be treated by a man.

Similarly, what if a KKK member refused to get an EKG from a black technician and the hospital didn’t accomodate him? Would he have a case against the hospital??

I just googled Somerset Medical Center. They promote themselves as serving “nearly 50,000” ER visits a year and state that their ER has a “hotel like lobby.” How hard would it have been to accommodate this request?
Many patients come into medical situations with fear and anxiety and not with cool rationality. Smoothing these fears is one of the first duties of a healthcare professional. Could not this situation been defused fairly easily in a big hospital?
BTW, I was once asked by a patient with a swastika tatoo if I was a Jew. I answered by telling him that everybody knows that Jews are the best doctors. The patient was satisfied with the answer, and I was satisfied that I had done the right thing professionally.

Socially, I agree with Dr. S.
Legally, she has a right to refuse treatment. She gets all the consequences, positive and negative, of refusing treatment. If she is particular about how the business service is performed, she can wait until that service is offered or go somewhere else and hope she survives her decision. (It sounds like she did.)

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no – or ought not to be – religious purists in emergency rooms. Ergo, the woman wasn’t really in extremis, was/is probably an attention seeking narcissist, and deserves nothing except scorn, esp. in her seeking a tort jackpot.

Alternately, if she’s that ready to die for her faith rather than allow emergency medical care, then she ought to hurry up and do so, doing the rest of the world- us- that lives in the 21st century a favour.

(I’m so very sick of the fraud of “diversity.”)

Just a thought.

VicB3

It does sound like reverse discrimination. What if there just didn’t happen to be a female technician on duty at the time? That’s not the hospital’s fault, and they shouldn’t have to pay two technicians to be on duty at all times when only one will do.

This is going to going to get kicked.

Similar request while on an OB rotation. Female fully covered except the eyes. She and her husband requested only female personel be present during her section. We told them it probably wouldn’t be possible, but that we would do the best we could and they were OK with that.

My question though – I find it hard to believe that these folks could get all female doctors in their own burka wearing society.

As to liability, it wouldn’t be any less reasonable than a lot of the crazy verdicts we see daily for a lawyer to pitch the – “made to sit and suffer as punishment by the big rich mean hospital staff, risking life and limb in the process…” If Teva can lose $500 million for producing a product I use daily, this case could win.

Walter – thanks for the link!

Dr. S, I disagree that “smoothing these fears is one of the first duties of a healthcare professional.” Someone comes in to the ED not breathing and we’re supposed to ask them if they want a cup of hot chocolate and a foot massage? Maybe play some Mahler over the intercom? The first duty is to stabilize the damn patient. Don’t create “duties” out of thin air where none exist. Disinformation like that just makes the job of emergency personnel harder than it already is.
You also try to set a precedent with a “big hospital.” So what’s the cutoff? If a hospital sees more than 40,000 patients, there should be all female staff available?
What if the patient was having an MI? Does the hospital have a “duty” to call in an all-female cath team? All females for the CXR? You start down the slippery slope, you can’t stop with the EKG tech. Do I have a right to demand all my caretakers are Irish if I allege that it is a requirement of my religion based on a nontraditional interpretation of the Bible?
What gets me most about this case is that according to several sources I have contacted and online research I have performed, the woman overstated the requirements of her religion regarding exposure to other men in emergency situations. Her religion didn’t require that no other men view her body in an emergency situation. Instead it was her personal preference that no men did so. However, she apparently concocted some religious directive to substantiate her personal preferences, then she and her husband (who is purportedly an attorney) sued the hospital on those same false pretenses.
That makes lawyers look bad and it makes Muslims look bad.
If her husband is a lawyer, he should be disbarred.

Ace – I hope the case isn’t the only thing that gets kicked.

White Coat: I am sympathetic with your view, but you err on one point: According to the USSC, her interpretation of her religious duties is what counts, not what 99.99% of her co-religionists think.

It is a sad day indeed when the French bring more testosterone making equipment to the table than Americans:

“Politicians in France united yesterday to ban Islamic veils that cover a woman’s face, which some described as ‘walking coffins’.

Deputies in the country’s 557-seat lower house, the National Assembly, voted in favour of the ban by 335 votes to one.”

John Burgess, I understand I can interpret my religion any way I want. However, if I want to kill those who work on the sabbath, I will have to pay the consequences and cannot successfully sue to be let free. She can require all female attendants, but I don’t see how the hospital has to provide them, she can refuse treatment.

“How hard would it have been to accommodate this request?”

Probably rather hard. A sizable number of Muslim women will not permit males to treat them in any way. This is particularly true for Wahbists (e.g. everyone in Saudi Arabia) and Salafist. An effective accommodation would essentially require every hospital and doctors office to staff a full time group of male physicians, nurses, etc., and a full time group of female physicians, nurses, etc. Essentially, you would need to double your employee expenditure.

I agree that a hospital should attempt to accomodate a patient’s request about who will treat her if it is possible to do so reasonably. But I don’t agree that a hospital should be required to do so, if meeting this requirement means having to hire or keep on duty extra staff. And I certainly don’t think a patient has the right to sue if the hospital is unable to satisfy her request. If the patient’s subjective desires, as opposed to her objectively-definable rights, give her a legal right to sue then it is literally impossible for the hospital (or any organization) to adopt policies that won’t be percieved as discriminatory by someone.

And where do we draw the line on meeting patient requests? If the hospital is required to satisfy the Muslim woman’s demand to be treated only by females, is it also required to satisfy a Muslim’s demand to not be treated by Jews? After all, we know that many Muslims despise Jews for religious reasons. If we must meet one demand, on what grounds can we refuse to meet the other? And what does the hospital do when a patient makes demands that can’t be met without breaking one of our anti-discrimination laws? For instance, is a hospital even allowed legally to take a doctor’s or technician’s gender into account when setting their schedules?

I am surprised by the number of people who think that this would have been a difficult accommodation. Female healthcare workers are not rare. The hospital in NJ seems to be a pretty big place from their website.
White Coat: health care is about the patient. If it makes a patient feel better to hear Mahler, then I’d play Mahler although I personally prefer Bach.
What if a patient ask for kosher food or vegan food? According to the story the patient sat for several hours before getting the EKG. Does this seem like good healthcare to you guys?
Being a doctor is being in a service profession. I profess to be of service to my patients, many of whom are a little crazy, some are real crazy. I do not expect people in my field to make big sacrifices to do their work, but a little bending to a scared foreigner is part of the job.

What about the providers? Shouldn’t they have some say in who is treated? If the on call cardiologist is male, and they have to bring in a female cardiologist, that male will lose the money he could have received for seeing that patient.

Dr. S

A visit to the emergency department for chest pain is a serious thing. Seconds and minutes matter. It seems you are equating it with getting a massage at the spa at the Four Seasons hotel, or experiencing a meal at a 5 star restaurant. Sure, health care workers should be kind, compassionate and accomodating to scared patients, but if there is not female EKG tech available, no matter how big the hospital is, then there is not one available. The patient has a right to refuse treatment. Period. End of story.

Die Waiting…

A Muslim woman is now suing Somerset Medical Center in New Jersey because staffers told her only male ER technicians were available to check whether her severe chest pains were caused by a heart attack……

Something tells me this is being badly reported.

From personal experience, and maybe all you doctors can tell me where I’m wrong, it takes about 5 minutes max to take an EKG, and there are a gazillion women trained to do so. Hell, I’ve given myself EKGs (at cardiac rehab.)

It’s very hard for me to believe that she sat for 5 hours or more because there were no women on staff at that time who could give her an EKG. In the dozens and dozens of EKG’s I’ve had administered to me, I think two or three were given by men (paramedics and an ER tech, and perhaps one during an MRI, I don’t know, I blame the versed.)

Apart from that, many of your points and issues are valid and interesting, and fun for debate, but, well, this didn’t happen as reported.

perhaps one during an *angiogram*, I don’t know, I stil blame the versed.

Jerry

Where do the demands stop?
OK, let’s say they did grab a woman to do the EKG, and it showed she was having an acute MI. Next stop, the cath lab right? This is a lot more invasive than performing an EKG so her body will be viewed even closer. Will she demand that no males be present, including the inverventional Cardiologist who will puncture an artery in her groin? If so, then is it the hospital’s duty to scour the city or region to summon an all female cast–all while the patient could die? Is this a hospital or a resort?

I thought she objected to any male being present.

Where do the demands stop?

When Sharia law is completely implemented. Bogus lawsuits like this one entrench it a little more, even if they lose, and indicate the progress so far.

B.R.A.D.

I’m not saying something weird was or wasn’t going on, or that she wasn’t making all sorts of outrageous demands. I’m not saying the ER should have given in to her demands.

I’m just saying this reads to me as if it has been badly reported and the whole story or salient features have been left out.

I have very little first hand experience with reporters, but the few I’ve had suggests they do a pretty lousy job. After experiencing an event as a witness or participant, and then seeing how it gets reported, I’m always amused at the difference. And then I go and believe the next thing a reporter tells me.

How hard it would have been to accommodate this woman is hard to say without knowing more about the organization and amount of traffic in the emergency room. In principle, yes, if its a reasonably large emergency room there probably was a female staff member who could have placed the EKG electrodes. However, if the emergency room was busy, getting that female staff member to do it might have been disruptive. If she was assigned to do something else, it might have been a problem pulling her away from it or having to get another person to cover for her. A busy emergency room is hard enough to keep functioning smoothly without musical chairs.

In response to the question about how women get medical care in societies in which such sexual segregation is routine, the answer is that they often don’t. There are female physicians in, e.g., Saudi Arabia, but conservative Muslim countries tend to have an inadequate supply of female physicians and other medical personnel, and women in such countries tend to get less, and lower quality, medical care. As in education, separate is rarely equal.

Just keep a wig handy. Your male EKG technician becomes transgendered which for the purpose of employment must be counted as a female. After the Muslim lady leaves, he can take off the wig and for employment purposes revert to being male. (Or would this Muslim woman also not want a transgendered EKG tech?)

Bennie leaves me wondering how this lady would handle a tech who had had a sex change operation. Would she have consented to Chas Bono? or Renee Richards?

I think that this lady has the right to have a female technician. I think that the hospital should work on having more female ER technicians. I personally think that if this hospital was unable to accommodate this lady’s request that they should have suggested some other hospitals she could go within a 30 mile radius and check on them to see if they have female ER technicians available.

There is a non-profit organization, Medical Patient Modesty (http://www.patientmodesty.org) that is starting. It is great because there needs to be stronger patient modesty. There are a lot of modest people who are unwilling to give up their modesty in medical settings and want only same gender medical professionals to treat them for certain things. It is not just muslims that care about their modesty in medical settings. Atheists, Christians, Jews, etc. all can be modest too.

I too can wait until the end to comment. Cost of this idea is ludicrious. To have to guess the number of female medical professionals needed to shift is wasteful. Should not the medical professional have the right to decide to only examine one sex? The system is designed to deal with what comes in the door and is most in need of help is treated by who (regardless of patient preference) is available. Are you really going to put modesty over your life? If so, stay home.

“Nearly 50,000 visits a year” equals about 5-6 visits an hour. That’s not an especially busy ER.

They no doubt had somebody who could have come in for 5 minutes and placed the EKG leads. Even if they were a busy ER, they could have grabbed somebody who was between patients.

The “seconds count” crowd is nearly laughable. If this woman could wait for 5 hours for someone to give her an EKG, this was not a case of “seconds count”. In most cases where I or a family member or friend went to an emergency room, even in the case of a heart attack or other situation where “seconds count”, they STILL had the person wait – in the ambulance with the paramedics if need be.

Also, if the doctors at the hospital can’t treat someone who is having a heart attack before they have EKG results, they should be sent back to school. EKGs were rare and expensive 40 years ago, and they still managed to treat people having heart attacks. They’ve got stethoscopes, they’ve got oxygen tanks, they’ve got infibulators.

I’ve been in an urban emergency room at 4AM on a Sunday morning — St. Vincent’s in Manhattan about 15 years ago. There was one Emergency Room doctor on duty. He looked up, asked “What’s the problem?” I held up my hand, which was covered in medical gauze and covered with blood. He indicated a room, I went in, you showed up a couple of minutes later and took care of it.

Should St. Vincents’ have been required to have a full complement of doctors, male, female, Arabic, Jewish (“Does this bus go to Canarsie?”), Christian, etc. etc.? I certainly don’t think so. I’m just glad the doctor was competent to fix my hand.

Bob

Reading through the posts I saw a word I didn’t recognize so I Googled “infibulators” oops! That’s not much like a defibrillator at all.

Dr. S, how hard would it be for a doctor to bring me a cold beer when I want one?

As for Bob Lipton’s example regarding an injured hand, I feel this is very different. Your hand is not private. I can understand why a woman would only want a female EKG technician since her breasts have to be exposed. I am a Christian woman who doesn’t want any men including doctors or nurses to see and touch certain parts of my body that should be reserved for my future husband. I feel that my future husband should be the only man in the world who can see and touch certain parts of my body.

I don’t believe in covering your face like muslim women do. It makes me feel hot to see the way muslim women dress in the summer. I love wearing shorts and tank tops/short sleeved shirts that are modest in the summer. I simply don’t want male medical professionals to see parts of my body that are covered by a bathing suit. If I had a knee problem, I would not mind seeing a male doctor as long as I remained clothed. I would wear shorts instead of pants of course.

I have gone to ER for severe case of swimmer’s ear and strep throat. I had male doctors for both. It didn’t matter to me because ears and throat are not private. I can let anyone in the public see those body parts.

I think that there should be far more female EKG technicians than male ones since men can take their shirt off any time in front of either sex.

I think it is horrible how people’s wishes for modesty are violated. There are some terrible modesty violation cases that you can find at http://www.patientmodesty.org/modesty.aspx .

And suppose it had been your private parts that you don’t want any man to see, you had come into St. Vincent’s at 4Am and only a male doctor was available?

I recognize your wishes and they are not invalid. But sometimes we don’t have choices.

Bob

If you are conscious you can usually refuse treatment.

Common sense is dead.

as this seems to be a religious problem, not a medical one (she could have been treated by a non muslim ….) perhaps she should take it up with god!

Bob,

I would simply have refused treatment at St. Vincent’s. I’d rather to suffer than let a man see certain parts of my body that are supposed to be for my future husband only. I would have waited until the next day or gone to another hospital. Many women suffer pain of labor for hours. For example, a lady who has a large ovarian cyst that has caused a lot pain has already suffered a lot of pain.

That is, I think, the correct decision in such a case. My issue is not, therefore, with you. It is with the sense of entitlement that suffuses our society: the belief that we should have exactly what we want, when we want it, and at no extra charge. You suggest that in order to get what you want, you are willing to accept the extra charges of waiting and pain. I admire that that statement and respect you for making it.

If you are willing to accept what is offered you, then that is one thing. If you demand extras, it costs more, in time, money, pain, risk or convenience.

In the case under discussion we are confronted with the situation where the woman and her husband are demanding extras and insisting that others pay for it. In the emergency room situation I cited, St. Vincents’ had decided that the right number of doctors to have in the emergency room at that hour was one. It certainly semed right to me as it was not busy. Yet, in order to accommodate some one who insisted on only being seen by a woman — or some other demand — they would have been forced to have several doctors present at a substantially higher cost — and who is to pay the scot?

By the by, St. Vincent’s recently ran out of money and closed — nothing to do, so far as I am aware, with issues under consideration in this thread.

Bob

Bob

Nobody know where someone is coming from. Victims of sexual abuse or assault have their world changed forever. These people who often become patients feel degraded and humiliated by opposite gender care and traumatized when this care is performed by strangers.

The civil rights act of 1964 that paved the way for equal employment put a privacy clause in the law. Example, if you were applying for a job in a women’s restroom it would be expected that it w0uld be a bona fide occupational job qualification that the employee be female.

Sexual assault victims who have post traumatic stress disorder (that is a recognized disability) have the right out of medical necesssity to obtain same gender care. Not giving it to them is the same as asking a wheelchair bound patient to get up and walk if they want to be attended to. Patients with PTSD often have triggers that will elevate bloood pressure and give false readings. Someone coming into the ER under those circumstances would find it medically necessary to accommodate same gender care to meet their disability in the event of suspected heart attack or stroke.

The bottom line is “to do no harm”. Patients feeling humiliated will avoid healthcare. It’s time for the medical community to be more sensitive to patient need first and foremost.

I think Majorie has provided excellent insights on sexual abuse victims. Many of us don’t take into consideration about how they might feel about opposite sex doctors or nurses doing intimate procedures on them. Many rape victims are even upset about the way some female nurses and doctors don’t respect their wishes for modesty. For example, one victim was upset about how she was put in a room with curtains. She wanted a private room with a door.