When a man goes in for a hernia exam they touch your testicles and ask you to cough.
I’d like to ask, just what are they feeling for? Is it a bounce or motion? Many hernia are located in the stomach.
Also how in medical school do they get the right training? Do they see patients with actual hernia?
I can sorta understand the coughing part; causing everything to tense up. I don’t get the turning of the head part.
I believe they are feeling for the bulging of intestines in the crotch region as you cough.
Unfortunately, I found I have one a few months ago, and it is pretty obvious that something is going on down there when you cough and have a hernia.
The doctor simply said “Yep, you have a hernia. Gotta get you to a surgeon.”
As for the “turn your head” bit, I had always thought that was an important step, but Occam’s Razor tells me it’s so you don’t cough in the doctor’s face.
These don’t heal. The surgeon let me choose a date, so I’ll probably go in August.
This.
A doctor I had when I was a kid was later determined to be a Pedophile.
He asked my brother and I to drop our pants for EVERY office visit. Although we (ages 6,7 ish) did not know what he was doing or anything about sex, we did not like that doctor and told our parents we did not want to go there anymore. My mom switched doctors (she did not know anything about what he was doing either).
Yeah, the turning your head is so you don’t cough in my face. That means, you should not turn the other direction when I check the other side because it means you are now coughing directly in my face. And for women, when I am just about to do a PAP smear and you get a cramp in your leg, just tell me and I will make sure that you can stretch out. If you just stretch out your legs, you will probably A) kick all of my supplies onto the floor or B) kick me in the head. Neither is good for the doctor.
Thanks! I didn’t even consider that. Ignorance fought.
Occam’s Razor is an unfortunate image applied to rectal manipulation.
In his autobiography, The Moon’s a Balloon, David Niven relates that in school one day, they all had to strip for the doctor and bend over. The doc came up behind each kid, grabbed his balls and said, “Cough.” But this one kid thought he’d said, “Off!” and tried to take off running with the doc’s hand still firmly clutching his balls. Ouch! 
What does this thread have to do with rectal manipulation?
A check for inguinal hernias is something I’ve done tens of thousands of times. It is unrelated to rectal exams.
How would you like to be the ONE hernia patient at a teaching hospital?
So one thing that is nice about the Navy is that they provide free medical care.
One that isn’t nice about the Navy is that they bring around a whole team of corpsmen to observe the most … indelicate procedures.
Back in my Navy days I was having trouble peeing because of a congenital urethral stricture. The doctor at the naval hospital explained how he was going to dilate the urethra, with progressively larger rods. Just before he started the procedure he asked if I would mind if some students observed. He was an officer, I wasn’t, so as far as I was concerned, “Yes sir” or “Yes doctor” were the only appropriate responses.
He then invited about eight teenagers in to observe.
It turned out that the procedure really didn’t hurt, but the classroom atmosphere sure was embarrassing.
Mine’s located right over my belly button. My doctor say I shouldn’t ever have to worry about it unless it becomes “incarcerated”. Anybody know what he’s talking about?
Incarcerated hernia: “Incarceration, which is where it cannot be reduced, or pushed back into place, at least not without very much external effort. In intestinal hernias, this also substantially increases the risk of bowel obstruction and strangulation.”
Or maybe he meant it makes you popular in the prison shower room.
He meant that it was fine to worry about it then because it would be Qadgop’s problem, and not his.
I got used as a training aid several times at the base hospital in New London [Independent Duty Corpsmen] for mainly wound care, though I did end up being used to teach doing pelvic exams as well. Though the funnest was when I had a tumor go from pea sized to pingpong ball sized in about 30 days … I ended up getting pelvics from about 13 different doctors as they argued about the best way to cut me open and remove it … they were not amused when I told them it was the most action I had seen since my husband was deployed a few months before 
:smack: Yes of course.
Too much into (heh) rectums from other thread. OK, razors and peritoneal and scrotal area. Nuh-uh.
You know I should have known something fishy was going on all these years when my Doctor asked me to hold his testicles while I coughed, I’m going to give him a stern talk!
Peritoneal? Get a grip, man. :dubious:
Similar to the way we learned DREs, in the SOCM course, we learned by practicing on each other. None of us actually had hernias, but I guess the idea is that once you feel a hundred or so normal patients, you will know what abnormal feels like.
The class is filled with nothing but Navy Seal and MARSOC Corpsmen, Ranger Medics, Green Berets trainees and Air Force PJs, so you can imagine the fuckery that goes on. My first practice exam was on a Navy guy who dropped his pants to reveal these: SFW.
Between shit like that, and watching people try to see whose fingers can reach the furthest inside a rectum. . . how can someone forget it. There were a lot of dudes with large hands who you did not want to be your training buddy for the day.
