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Loaded for Bear May Mean No Care
Last week, I received an email from a woman, I’ll call her Miranda, taking me to task for an article I had written that she found online. If Miranda had her way, I’d be walking the plank about now, or on my way to life in prison. The article she found is about patient modesty and how it affects one’s ability to get medical care. It poses the problem, considers the roots of the situation, then offers ideas to help someone get beyond modesty hurdles in order to benefit from better medical care. Oh, but Miranda was not happy about that article! She graced my email inbox with a missive (out of curiosity I pasted it into a word document to see how many printed pages it would be – about 5!), as if she was the prosecutor outlining all the reasons I should get life in prison, taking me to task because I had not taken into account survivors of sexual abuse. Further, the fact that I used a car as a metaphor offended her because people aren’t cars! (She’s right. They aren’t. I didn’t say they were. I used cars as a metaphor.) She expected me to rewrite and republish the article, and she wanted a “public apology” for being so callous and ignoring the plight of sexual abuse survivors. Wow! A little back story: I wrote that article almost 8 years ago when I was writing patient empowerment articles for About.com. I stopped writing for them in early 2014, and I no longer have access to change or edit the 1,000+ articles I wrote for them. In the meantime they have changed the name of the site to VeryWell. They edit the articles themselves from time to time, and change the dates to be more current – all to keep Google happy, but confusing people who think I wrote them recently. So – for Miranda – I replied – politely – that I was sorry she had suffered sexual abuse, and I was sorry she wasn’t satisfied with the article, but that the intent of the article…