Next week for Grand Rounds I am scheduled to present to fellow
interns, clinicians and classmates. Grand Rounds is required of all
interns in both Trimester 9 and 10.
Clinical Question
You are given the freedom to present on a clinical question of
your choice and my friend and I decided to pose the following
clinical question: How do Clinical Outcomes Improve with Physician
Education on LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual) Sensitive
Issues? We chose this topic based on a recent discussion on the
importance of asking patients sensitive questions revolving around
sexual history. As naturopathic physicians, we cannot brush over a
patient's sexual history by not asking if they are in a committed
relationship, having sexual relations with men women or both, or
how many partners they've had in a lifetime. If we avoid these
questions, we are not getting a true picture of the patient's risks
for disease.
Interesting Research
Disease types and risks can vary depending on the patient's
social and sexual history. For example, lesbian patients were once
told they had less of a risk of developing HIV/AIDS. This, of
course, is entirely untrue. In fact, our research found many
lesbian patients reported that when they were asked if they were
sexually active, it was usually automatically assumed they were
only intimate with males. If they disclosed they were in an
intimate relationship with another female, it was assumed they
never had sexual relations with a male in their lifetime.
And then comes the whole topic of transsexuals who can
exogenously inject hormones to more physically resemble the
opposite sex. This comes with a whole set of probable disease
developments. These are just a few of the stereotypes we dug up
during research for our presentation. This was enough to spark our
interest to investigate this topic further and present our findings
to our fellow interns.
Valuable Resource
During our research, my co-presenter and I visited the Howard
Brown Center in downtown Chicago. Howard Brown is a health care
organization that serves more than 36,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender individuals annually. The organization provides
primary medical care, behavioral health counseling, research,
HIV/STI prevention and social services for all age groups. We met
with Chandra Matteson, RN, to discuss our presentation to ensure we
were on the right track and to gain more information from someone
who works with this population first-hand. She was more than
helpful in critiquing our slides and provided us with a wealth of
resources. We had such a great time we took pictures with Chandra
and added it to our presentation!
Unfortunately, you have to be a student or faculty member of the
University to be invited to attend Grand Rounds, but I urge those
who are in health care to take another look into this populations'
unique set of health issues. It has been indeed proven that with
training in GLBT-sensitive issues clinical outcomes are more
favorable.
Wish me luck on my presentation! I will report how it goes next
week!