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> My daughter is in her 20s now and is still small -- it's just the way she is. When she goes to see her primary, do you know what their first question is? "When was your last period."

Is that supposed to be a problem? How does it connect to the story in your comment?

The question seems to be warranted to me, since being underweight can stop you from menstruating. So if you find someone thin and her last period was off in the distant past, you can conclude that there's a problem and something should be done about it; if it was a couple of weeks ago, you can conclude that she's fine.

(It could also just be something that is automatically assessed as a potential indicator of all kinds of different things. Notably pregnancy. For me, it bothered me that whenever you have an appointment at Kaiser for any reason, part of their checkin procedure is asking you how tall you are. I'd answer, but eventually I started pointing out to them that I wasn't ever measuring my height and they were just getting the same answer from my memory over and over again. [By contrast, they also take your weight every time, but they do that by putting you on a scale and reading it off.] The fact that my height wasn't being remeasured didn't bother them; I'm not sure what that question is for.)

You're very much over thinking this. That's the first question every doctor asks a woman, and legitimate problems are often overlooked because of it.

I’m a normal weight, and get asked the same question. More importantly, I can tell them, “I have a regular cycle” and they WILL NOT take that as an answer. I HAVE to give them a date, and they will ask me to make one up if I can’t remember or want to decline giving them that information.

Particularly given the alarming stories of people being prosecuted for having miscarriages, it feels ridiculous.

If anything I hope more automated diagnostics and triage could help women and POC get better care, but only if there’s safeguards against prejudice. There’s studies showing different rates of pain management across races and sexes, for example. A broken bone is a broken bone, regardless of sex or race.

> and they will ask me to make one up if I can’t remember or want to decline giving them that information

Doesn't this suggest that they don't care what the answer is?

It sounds like a form to be filled out…

They, as an individual healthcare provider, don’t care. The system will not allow them to ignore it, though, so the system cares very much.

OK. What is this fact supposed to teach us?

> Particularly given the alarming stories of people being prosecuted for having miscarriages

You need to delete your social media accounts and change where you're getting your news from. Nobody is "being prosecuted for having miscarriages". A few people have been investigated for drug abuse during pregnancy which led to the baby's death, which sensationalist news stories twisted into attention-grabbing headlines.

A doctor asking about cycle is just a core piece of diagnostic data like taking blood pressure and temperature, not some conspiracy to harm you.

The system doesn't know that you're a smart person who will only say "I have a regular cycle" when you've had something that could reasonably be called a regular cycle. A lot of patients are stupid, and requiring a quantitative answer eliminates one source of stupidity. Yeah, this particular doctor knows you're smart, but I hope you can see what disasters might result if the procedure said "the doctor may skip this step if the patient is smart".

It's the same reason why the doctor will take your temperature, instead of accepting your word that you took your own temperature and it is normal.

https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/primary-care-checkli...

Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I could have been. My point was that doctors treat women differently than men, even when they're the parents. I don't think that it's inherently malicious, but there is absolutely a bias.

You are asking how it connects, and it absolutely doesn't. But they keep asking and won't accept "it's regular" as an answer.

She's in her 20s and is seeing her primary for routine things, not because of her weight -- that part of the story was about how they chastised my wife for giving her whole milk but said absolutely nothing to me about it later on.

My experiences broadly support your conclusions.

However, your argument focuses on the routine intake instead of any listening part. The fact that the doctor measures height, weight, temperature, and blood pressure on intake and then asks about LMP doesn’t surprise me… that’s the part of the script where you just provide the data before you bring up concerns.

Not to say the doctor was not a jerk, just that your argument doesn’t do much for me.

Yes? That's a very important piece of information, and I hope would be a thing a doctor asks, especially if there are concerns about weight or nutrition.

She's not there about her weight, though. I highly encourage you to talk to women about their experiences here.

The weight thing was not the key aspect of my original comment. They chastised my wife for continuing to give my daughter whole milk while being underweight, but did not make similar comments to me. That was the point.

For women, their pains and problems are far too often whisked away by hand waving and "it's hormones and periods" and serious issues are often overlooked. Very little has changed in that area over the last twenty years.

Why would they suggest switching to a lower fat percentage milk?

My dumb answer would be that less fat means more sugar per kcal, so less satiety per kcal. No idea if that's correct.

Incorrect, not all products that reduce fat necessarily increases carb/sugar content.

Wrong. If you just take out the fat you've necessarily got more of everything else per kcal. I didn't say per volume, I said per kcal.

medical industry must be going for some long term achievement in how much they disbelieve, mistreat, and degrade women going to them.

I wonder how many units of their training courses are spent on this and how much is spent on the cultural reinforcement of it.

Yes, let's pretend that the bias does not exist, that is helpful. It certainly doesn't have to do with the fact that it's currently a 60/40 split in active male vs female physicians. Or that women are more likely to be taken seriously by doctors:

    * https://www.health.harvard.edu/pain/the-dangerous-dismissal-of-womens-pain 
    * https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10937548/

Are you really unwilling to admit that such a bias exists?

This seems like an especially bad faith interpretation of the comment you were responding to.