Favorites from this week

For the past two days I was at a facilitator's training for Centering Pregnancy. I knew this before, but I'll say it again - I LOVE Centering Pregnancy, and the idea of Centering Healthcare as a whole. And to now be trained as a facilitator?!?! My midwife cup has runneth over. I have been providing Centering for a few months now, but to finally have the training needed will really amp up my approaches. Women's support systems, the power of a group of people, and providing clinical care through a public health lens. Bazinga. Hope you all have had a great weekend!...Free the Nurses - Anna Reisman at SlateCommon sense, but not common law or practice. Spread the word, and get involved politically for the APNs and CNMs in your state!"...When I called Linda Pellico, associate professor at the Yale School of Nursing and director of the Graduate Entry Prespecialty in Nursing program, she didn’t mince words. “Lifting the barriers on the scope of practice will solve the health care dilemma,” she said, pointing me to the nearly 700-page 2010 report by the Institute of Medicine called “The Future of Nursing.” The document, co-authored by Donna Shalala, recommends that nurse practitioners practice independently, without restrictions, to the “full extent of their education and training.”

The nurse practitioners I’ve worked with as colleagues (I’m a primary care doctor, and I’ve practiced in clinics in Baltimore, New York, and Connecticut), and those who have taken care of me have been pretty awesome. When I was pregnant, I saw a middle-aged lanky nurse midwife who had a wry and down-to-earth sense of humor. He didn’t exude that sense of impatience that you get with so many doctors, that feeling that you’re holding him up from something more important. When I have questions about my very old patients, many of whom have dementia complicated by agitation or insomnia and who are not responsive to my usual bag of tricks, my go-to person is not a psychiatrist—she’s a gerontological nurse practitioner.

For some doctors, a larger number of independent nurse practitioners would be great news: John Schumann, a general internist who runs the University of Oklahoma–Tulsa internal medicine residency program, told me that he welcomes all hands on deck: “We should be happy when people from other career lines want to work in primary care. Primary care is hard and undervalued, and doctors should not have a monopoly on it.”..."...The Case for Teaching Kids 'Vagina,' 'Penis,' and 'Vulva' - Catherine Buni at The Atlantic"...Despite evidence of their protective value, the words cause trouble sometimes. Two weeks after Rohdenburg gave her lesson in March, as required by a new state law, a biology teacher at a public high school in Idaho said "vagina" in one of his classes. Several parents filed complaints against the teacher, Tim McDaniel, and now he is under investigation. Last June, Michigan State Representative Lisa Brown was banned from Lansing's state house floor after she said "vagina." One sexual-abuse prevention trainer in New England tells the story of a mother who discovered her first-grader had learned the word "penis" in school. The mother pulled her daughter from class. "You've destroyed her innocence!" she shouted at the school's counselor....Here lies the heart of the matter, when it comes to sex-abuse prevention: Educators like Rohdenburg want children to understand that their "private parts" are just that--private and off limits to others. But they also want students to be comfortable talking about these body parts, and with the words that describe them. "We don't want kids to think they're going to get in trouble by asking questions about sexual matters and health," Palumbo says. When officials pull a teacher into an investigation or escort a legislator from her state house floor for using the word "vagina," or a parent removes a child from a class that uses the word "penis," children are more likely to think their questions will get them in trouble, she says. This shuts down communication, reinforcing the culture of secrets and silence perpetrators rely on for cover. This is why Rohdenburg holds meetings with school staff and parents before her classes, and explains to them the reasons she uses the accurate words that everyone understands..."...Who Are You?New Zealand's PSA on Preventing Rape. ...Street harassment, masculinity, and impressing other dudes - Mychal Denzel Smith at FeministingA great piece about learned and reinforced behavior, inequality, power, and, at the heart of it, feminism."...Of course, it’s in part about some men feeling entitled to women’s bodies, ignoring autonomy because in their minds women exist solely to appease their sexual whims. It’s also about reinforcing power dynamics. They are sending a message to the women they harass that they are property and they need to know their place in our social hierarchy. But they’re also trying to impress other dudes.That’s true of most performances of masculinity. Men are trying to protect themselves from ridicule at the hands of other men. I think of Kendrick Lamar’s “The Art of Peer Pressure” where he says “look at me… I got the blunt in my mouth/usually I’m drug free/but shit, I’m with the homies.” This behavior doesn’t come naturally, but so as not to look like anything less than a man in front of the homies, he does it anyway.The same principle is at work with street harassment. Very few of these men are actually under the impression that they’ll get to have sex with the random women they assault on the street. But what would their boys say if they just let a woman walk by without even trying? You can imagine the range of sexist and homophobic slurs that would fly. So they holler, they grab, they make primitive noises, and they ultimately fail. They’re likely to catch some heat for failing, too, so to disabuse themselves of any lost respect among their peers, they reestablish power/dominance by hurling insults and epithets. They can go back to the homies with confidence even after having come up short on the real prize.That’s what’s truly important to these men, and it’s also the reason street harassment isn’t limited to just cisgender hetero women. Gay men, lesbians, and trans people all catch it because to deride any of these identities is to affirm your status as a “real man.” There are a bunch of men making a sizable portion of the population feel unsafe in the streets and other public places in order to prove themselves to a bunch of other insecure men and be rewarded with…some dap? I honestly don’t know..."...As seen on Catapult's Facebook Page