The real takeaway from the massive stream of books, articles and stories that have emerged on this issue in the last five years should be this: Medical gaslighting can kill women and girls. It’s damn unpleasant to be manipulated by your doctor in this uniquely demeaning way, but that’s nothing compared with the harm that comes from untreated disease. In reality, though, psychological harms are the least of our worries. This response is not surprising.Īs long as we define medical gaslighting in purely psychological terms, it will be reasonable for medicine to respond with psychological remedies. In an article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, for example, two doctors respond to the recent social media storm by dismissing medical gaslighting as a mere “perception,” one that will disappear if physicians present their decision to ignore symptoms with an optimal tone of voice. Strictly speaking, gaslighting is a psychological issue - the emotional harm that occurs when a credible voice is discredited to the point of self-doubt. What’s the problem here? Why has this intense public dissatisfaction with medicine failed to generate action? And though gender equity is a common theme now in medical and governmental health organizations, it centers on women’s obstacles getting to the doctor, not the obstacles we face once we’re there. Neither the American Medical Association nor the National Institutes of Health has a program to address, or even understand the nature of the problem, and neither do leading medical centers such as Johns Hopkins or the Mayo Clinic. In fact, according to the National Library of Health, a search for “medical gaslighting” yields only four articles related to patients’ health care experiences in the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed database. Stephanie Scarbrough/APĪn ill-advised Supreme Court decision could impact health care in underserved communitiesĪside from likes, clicks and ad sales, these cycles of public frustration have had no systemic impact. We still don’t have a scientific study that determines how often women face this problem. Supreme Court is seen on Thursday, June 29, 2023, in Washington. But here we are, five years after that social media storm, measuring the size of public frustration once again, as if the idea of medical gaslighting is brand new. It seemed that we might actually be on the cusp of change, as a long list of new journalistic memoirs on the issue were then published - one, “ The Invisible Kingdom,” a bestseller. In 2018, the “ incendiary healthcare hashtag” of #doctorsaredickheads, gathered so many gaslighting stories so quickly on Twitter that an analysis of its data seemed to suggest that women patients were ready to storm the metaphorical gates of the medical profession. In the thousands of stories shared in the recent viral trend, patients report that their perspectives on the situation were indeed credible, and doctors’ failure to respect that led to medical harm. In medicine, the term applies when doctors proceed as if patients’ reports of pain or disability are not credible enough to warrant action -but the stakes are far higher than they were for Bergman in the film. The metaphor of gaslighting arises from a 1944 film by that name, where a husband, Charles Boyer, sets out to convince his wife, Ingrid Bergman, that she can’t trust her own thoughts and experiences. Frustration over medical gaslighting is heating up again, with more than 262 million views for #medicalgaslighting on TikTok. What we see in this stream of thousands of posts on social media are firsthand stories from patients, mostly women, who say doctors have ignored, minimized or dismissed their symptoms as stress or anxiety, often with severe consequences.
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