WIDLIMS #25 – From midwife to medic with Dr Rumbi

In this week’s episode, I sat down and spoke with Rumbi, behind @rumbithemedic on Instagram and TikTok. She has an interesting background, having qualified and worked first as a midwife, then as a medical doctor in the UK. She has an interest in educating others and often does so through accessible clips and posts on social media, which is where we first connected.

This episode covers a few different topics, including:

• Rumbi’s journey into medicine via midwivery
• different routes into doing a medical degree/becoming a doctor
• increasing accessibility to people from a range of different backgrounds, who may typically be in a worse position than middle class kids when applying
• relationships within the multidisciplinary team and interplay between doctors and other allied healthcare professionals, with a focus on nurses and midwives’ relationships with doctors
• stigma surrounding reproductive health and what we both wish was taught more in medical school/in general in society

Listen wherever you usually get your podcasts or in the web player below:

If any particular patient comes in and we really do drill down on the exact intricacies of what’s relevant but even into their sexual wellbeing, their history, and the next doctor they see does exactly the same, and the next doctor they see does the same… it helps to build the comfort level if that makes sense.

Then they feel like […] this is just part of the medical questioning, this is part of the professional curiosity that my doctor has when they are looking after me.

All of us have a role to play in that.

Dr Rumbi Mutenga

I hope you enjoy listening to this episode and learn something new. It is a bit of a different one for me, but an enjoyable one to record.

Photo by CottonBro from Pexels.

Mentioned in the episode

• Rumbi’s book, Catharsis available herehttps://www.amazon.com/Catharsis-collection-original-Rumbi-Mutenga-ebook/dp/B0B1S8T7R6
• Melanin Medics website here
• The Diana Award Mentoring programme more info here

The clitoris claim… And yes, it does seem like some medical textbooks left out the clitoris. I am not sure what my textbook was like – whether the clitoris was labelled or not – but I definitely think there is not much focus on the internal structure of the clitoris, as it is quite a large organ, with a head and two legs.

Here is some more reading regarding reproductive health stigma and censoring of the genitalia of those assigned female at birth:

• Vice article Fear of the clit: a brief history of medical books erasing women’s genitalia here
• Psychology Today article Female Sexual Pleasure here
• Article in the Independent by American ObGyn Dr Jen Gunter, MD here

Before you go…

I am doing my best to keep going with my podcast despite working full time as a junior doctor and personal life getting in the way! If you would like to support me, please share this episode and others and follow me on Instagram and Twitter where my username is @widlims. I am also considering setting up some sort of fundraising platform to fund the website and podcast hosting platform which is costing me a couple of hundred pounds per year.