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In the summer of 2017, when Allison Martinez, now 28, was in college, she developed chronic and intense stomach pains. Naturally, she made an appointment with a doctor to try to figure out what was going on. Instead, she had her first experience with medical gaslighting. “When I was experiencing chronic stomach pain I was told by every doctor that it was stress,” Martinez tells POPSUGAR. “One doctor tried to convince me that because I was in college and was working that I had to be stressed out. I had lost over 10 pounds and couldn’t finish a meal without experiencing pain.” Martinez knew her symptoms were being caused by something more serious, and she continued to try to find someone who could help her. But it wasn’t until October of 2018 that she finally visited a doctor who recommended exploratory surgery. It revealed the true cause of her symptoms — not stress, but an enlarged, abnormal appendix and pelvic congestion syndrome.
Martinez had her appendix removed and soon after was also diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Postsurgery, Martinez says, she “was able to eat again” and her “stomach pain was resolved.” But that period of not knowing was horrible. “It was a scary feeling to know something is clearly wrong and no doctor is willing to help,” she says. And unfortunately, her experience is not unheard of, or even all that uncommon.
One out of every seven doctor-patient encounters results in diagnostic error — which includes missed, wrong, or delayed diagnoses — according to a study in The Medical Journal of Australia. At least a portion of that diagnostic error can be attributed to what’s sometimes known as medical gaslighting, says Liz Kwo, MD, a Massachusetts-based physician and the chief medical officer at Everly Health. You may be familiar with romantic gaslighting, which refers to a form of psychological abuse, wherein someone manipulates their partner into questioning their own reality. Medical gaslighting, on the other hand, occurs when medical professionals disregard their patients’ feelings or reported symptoms, attributing their experiences to psychological causes (like stress) or denying their symptoms entirely, leading to harmful delays in diagnoses. And it’s all too common: research shows that one in five women report that a healthcare provider has ignored or dismissed their symptoms.
What Is Medical Gaslighting, and How Does It Happen?
“[Medical gaslighting] describes the experience of having one’s symptoms dismissed by a medical provider,” Dr. Kwo says. At its foundation is, essentially, a lack of trust. “When [healthcare providers] don’t necessarily trust either the reporter’s symptoms or what they’re really thinking,” that’s when medical gaslighting occurs, she explains.
This can stem from a lack of experience or clinical knowledge on the provider’s part. A patient may report a host of symptoms that “don’t correlate directly back to a potential reason for why this could happen, and sometimes that gets dismissed as overly exaggerating,” Dr. Kwo says. Those symptoms may then be chalked up to stress, hormones, or other psychosocial or related factors. But prejudice and implicit bias can also play a role in a physician’s tendency toward medical gaslighting.
