It’s awkwardly written but I imagine it’s the difference between “I consent to this at an undefined but bounded time in the future” vs “I consent to this right now or at this predetermined single moment in time”.
Alternatively it could be “exams that would previously been non-consensual.”
Surgery can have complications, so the patient may be under anesthesia longer than originally planned delaying the practice exam.
It's worse. They actually didn't require any consent for pelvic exams before. They could just have med students in there watching and not even tell you about it. So if you've ever had surgery in a teaching hospital, it's totally possible you had a bunch of interns gawking at your undercarriage without knowing it. Fuckin horrific, right?
I wonder how this is handled in emergency situations. Im in EMS and we practice under implied consent if the patient is unresponsive. Can't say I've ever been on a call where I've needed to inspect someone's genitals outside of a quick look for priapism/injury but it might be a thing in the ER
It's more than awkwardly written. It's stupidly written. I understand the subject matter, but acting like nonconsensual exams will now have consent is silly. How could they?
Take the word "nonconsensual" out of the headline and it describes accurately what has occurred. Or rephrase to "nonconsensual pelvic exams no longer allowed."
My wife once told me about how surprising it was that there were a non insignificant number of other women in her med school ethics class arguing that non-consensual exams were just fine.
I had a badly broken bone at one point and was put under general anesthesia to set it.
I woke up to a room of 12 people, many of them grimacing, in a much larger cast than I had been told I would have. I was pretty confused why so many people were in the room, and when i asked why my cast was so much bigger than expected i got a vague non answer.
The break healed cleanly to no lasting issue, but I'm relatively sure that they knocked me out and had some students set the bone, and they likely did it wrong. An actual doc likely had to fix it, and they went overboard on the cast to fully immobilize the area after the fix.
Not the same horror of a non consensual pelvic exam, but overall I think the whole "learn by doing" aspect of medicine, especially on unconscious patients that literally cant object to poor technique, is way more widespread than people realize.
I've seen students do casts on my kid. They oversized it by a good amount. The doc even told them that, right there and then. But it was a short term cast so we didn't care.
