What are your thoughts and feelings about the intersection of personal privacy and medical treatment?

Please feel free to skip to my actual questions at the bottom – I realized after writing it that my lead-up paragraph is a bit academic, probably because this semester’s logic class has taken over my brain. I assure you, though, that my interest is personal, as I am trying to steel myself for a colonoscopy.

I have heard that most people are not too hung up on letting medical professionals explore what they need to explore, but I just can’t get over it. I know that I can trust docs in a professional sense, and that medical folks (almost never?) have any sort of interest in bodies of patients other than what they need to be interested in to help patients be healthy – worry about sexual interest is not the issue for me. I think it’s the fact that the doc has clothes on and I don’t. I guess I don’t really count it as a loss of privacy if all people in an area are naked, like at a nude beach. To generalize, I feel like the experience of keeping or losing privacy is dependent on the existence of a two-party relationship, where one party maintains some psychologically significant barrier – any component of the mental self-protection of feeling like an autonomous individual – that the second party loses. Like, I thnk it’s sort of a conceptual binary predicate, even if grammatically we do not use the word that way: “___ maintains her privacy”, I think, always implies “___ maintains her privacy in the face of ___ ”, and likewise “___ loses his privacy” always implies “___ loses his privacy to ____”.

But, as I mentioned above, I gather that most people don’t count seeing the doc as a loss of privacy. If this is the case, either my theory about privacy being embedded in a certain sort of binary relationship is mistaken – or, if it is correct, this means that most people do not have a psychologically significant individualism-barrier specifically when it comes to doctors.

Do you have any hangups about letting a doc see you unclothed, or with invasive procedures? Any idea why you might feel these as a loss of privacy, or why you might not? If you do feel these as a loss of privacy, how do you cope with it mentally?