It is STUNNING to me the way that the devastation that is women’s pain is diminished, feminized, infantilized, repackaged, stigmatized, and slut-shamed.

Endometriosis ravages women’s bodies and lives but starts out as “bad cramps” and a girl missing school.

Interstitial Cystitis starts as “she always has UTIs”—read: must be sleeping around.

Don’t get me started on that severe vaginal and pelvic muscular spasms that develop in the uncountable numbers of women I see who have been raped and molested. They live with a Charley horse in their vaginas 24/7. Imagine a leg cramp you can never stretch. IMAGINE.

So women girls are embarrassed. They live in pain. They suffer quietly. And the thing about pain is that it doesn’t make you stronger—it carves the biochemical paths in your body that that feel pain deeper, making it harder and harder to reverse as time marches on.

But what if someone believed them? What if medicine jumped on painful periods or dysuria or sexual assault the way we treat a high school basketball player’s knee?

So many women would have a chance. A chance to for their voices to get bigger instead of smaller, to thrive instead of survive.

So to anyone who says advocacy has no place in medicine, you frighten me with your ignorance and willful blindness. Validating and investigating women’s and girls pain is a radical act in a medical culture that rolls its eyes at female pain.

And for that girl, it is a watershed moment of protection and preservation. Take those moments seriously. It is an honor and immense privilege to gatekeep her future and allow her to live out her potential unencumbered by chronic pain and shame. Act accordingly in your oath.