Straight talk about experiences with physicians.

How do lesbian and bisexual women perсеivе the role of their family physicians? little research addresses this question for lesbian women and none addresses it for bisexual women.

What we do know suggests that providers’ attitudes and behaviours can profoundly affect lesbians’ health-seeking behaviours. In a review of the lesbian health care literature from 1970 to 1990, Stevens located 28 studies, all of them conducted in the United States. Nine of these studies discussed providers’ attitudes toward lesbian clients; the remainder reported lesbians’ experiences and perceptions of their interactions with health care providers. Canadian Pharmacy

These findings do not present an optimistic picture. In general, health care providers hold negative attitudes toward lesbian and gay clients that can influence the quality of health care delivered and client health outcomes. Two related issues here are the assumption of heterosexuality and the negative effect of disclosing one’s sexual orientation.

Physicians appear to underestimate the numbers of lesbian and bisexual women in their practices. Simkin24 suggests that lesbians do not receive good-quality health care because they are “invisible” to their health care providers. Trippet and Bain found that lesbians did not seek traditional health care for common medical concerns because of marginalization. Lesbians often do not regularly attend gynecological clinics for reproductive health for fear of disclosure or because of negative experiences, placing them in an underscreened group. While no illnesses are unique to lesbians or bisexual women, their concerns could go unnoticed. buy cialis professional

For primary care providers, such concerns include breast and cervical screening, sexually transmitted infections, HIV, substance abuse, pregnancy, parenting concerns, lesbian battering, alcohol problems, and childbearing dilemmas. There is a concern that lesbians have been slow to adopt safer sex practices, presumably because of lack of readily available information and misinformation from health care professionals. The prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases is low among lesbians, yet misinformation about STDs is often given (eg, use of condoms during intercourse, which assumes that the partner is male).

We lack Canadian data on these health care issues. During a larger study where we, the research team, set out to explore these concerns, we were struck by the importance lesbian and bisexual women ascribed to family physicians. The objective of this paper was to explore in depth participants’ experiences with their family physicians to learn about barriers to care and about how physicians can provide supportive care to their lesbian and bisexual patients.