Your Body, Your Choice: Confessions of a Female Doctor

Confessions of a trailblazing female M.D. who says that she once colluded with her patient’s pain by prescribing psychotropics — but that was then

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You may trust me because I have an M.D. That may mean, to you, that I have information that you don’t have. I know things about your body — about bodies — that you are not privy to by virtue of your non-expert station in life.

You may trust me because I am a woman. Because women inspire the trust of a mother, with their flowing hair and eyelashes, their soft skin and breasts, and their uniquely prosodic voices.

What is it, then, for a woman to become a Western physician? Is it perhaps possible that egalitarian feminism has given us an opportunity to feel the difference between a man in a patriarchal role and a woman assuming that same position? Is a woman misusing her power more dangerous than a man? It feels easier to trust a female physician, but what is it to trust a woman who believes the body needs to be managed? Who likely has not cultivated any intimacy with her own body and its interplay with the mind and emotions let alone the body, mind and emotions of her patient. Perhaps only a women divested of her own relationship to her body’s innate wisdom could become a Western physician. And only as that physician can she then capture men and women as patients in a way that fundamentally disempowers them in service of her seeming expertise around the