Doctor Fail: The medication I can’t get my patients to take

People with pain, especially from marginalized groups, often feel dismissed by their care providers and indeed often leave the encounter without a plan for resolving their symptoms. I don’t have a solution to end gender bias across societies, but what I can offer is a framework for describing pain to your physician to help us accurately diagnose your issue.

German and Danish researchers have created a questionnaire to measure what they call “D” - a tendency to ruthlessly pursue one’s own interests, even when this harms others (or even for the sake of harming others), while having beliefs that justify these behaviours.

As a young woman growing up in the 80s, I read that our monthly menses connected us to our ancestors and the earth. Embracing womanhood meant reveling in the monthly flow. As a science undergraduate student in the 90s, I realized that our ancient ancestors were either pregnant or lactating through most of their lives and wouldn’t have had periods anyway.

Cervical cancer is a vaccine-preventable disease. All of this worry, all of this pain, all of this death, is completely preventable with the HPV vaccine.

Fear of the unknown or unfamiliar can make you act against your own guiding principles. This month everyone is talking about misinformation and school Sex Ed.

The good news is that herpes simplex virus will likely never make you sick. For the vast majority, the worst that might happen is a cold sore, either on your mouth or down below.

Are you heading into a hedonistic summer? The possibility of pregnancy or STIs can make sexual encounters risky. There are a few important methods of decreasing risk after an unprotected encounter.

People get all mixed up about the differences between gender identity, sexual orientation, biological sex, and gender expression. They’re all very different but they’re all included in the LGBTQ2AI+ rainbow!

Patients (and some physicians) think that genital hygiene products are useful but the reality is that the industry exploits a marketing strategy designed to turn shame and insecurity about sexuality into profit. Your crotch should smell like crotch - it’s healthier that way!

Birth control? There’s an app for that! Not a good one, but the slick marketing campaign associated with the Natural Cycles app has persuaded hundreds of thousands of women worldwide to put their contraceptive trust entirely in the hands of an app.

We commonly associate romance on Valentine's Day with sexy lingerie. Why is lingerie so popular, or at least so popularized?

How did I become a smart, savvy, shameless MD? It’s my superhero origin story, and my superpower is shamelessness.

February 28 was Rare Diseases Day, and this year I was shocked to learn that Lichen Sclerosus is classified as a rare disease.

You’d never know it from my waiting room.

As I age, and my friends age, I hear a lot about bladder problems. The most common troublesome symptoms are frequent trips to the bathroom, especially at night, and occasionally not making it to the bathroom in time. Many people just think this is a part of getting older, but there are many treatment options for Overactive Bladder.