Medical Gaslighting Is Real—Here’s How to Recognize It and Respond

Hannah Seo
·7 min read

Nanzeeba Ibnat/Getty Images

The abdominal pain started when Bastion was 21. It flared and didn’t subside as they went from expert to expert to figure out what was wrong. “Many of the doctors would tell me, because I have polycystic ovary syndrome…that this was just a burst cyst,” Bastion, who asked that we use only their first name, tells SELF. While a ruptured cyst can be agonizing, it typically goes away with time.

But for Bastion, it didn’t. The pain persisted for six months through multiple health care visits and ER trips. “I had one doctor tell me I’d probably pulled my hip muscle, and another doctor told me that it was just ‘women’s problems,’” they say. Eventually a family member called in a favor and asked a health care professional to do a scan. “I had a seven-and-a-half-centimeter cystic tumor on my ovary,” says Bastion, who immediately underwent surgery to remove it.

That was Bastion’s first major experience with “medical gaslighting,” a term that’s used to describe instances in which health care providers ignore or dismiss symptoms and discount patient experiences based on their own implicit bias or stereotypes. Many folks who experience it—particularly women, people of color, gender nonconforming individuals, and older adults—can live with unresolved symptoms and delayed diagnoses that can seriously impact their health. “Those that experience the most medical harms are always going to be the people who are sitting at the margins,” Chelsey R. Carter, PhD, MPH, an assistant professor of public health at Yale School of Public Health, tells SELF.

Here’s how to tell if you are experiencing medical gaslighting and what to do about it.

What does medical gaslighting look like?

To be fair to medical professionals, it can sometimes be hard to pin down exactly what’s causing certain symptoms, particularly if they come and go and are common to many different types of conditions and diseases.

When seeing patients, doctors are often “thinking in terms of probability,” Neil Iyengar, MD, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, tells SELF. For example, lung cancer is more common in older people—the average age at the time of diagnosis in the US is 70, and just 10% of cases occur in people under 55. If you’re younger and have pain while deep breathing and you’re coughing up blood, a doctor won’t jump straight to cancer as the likely cause because they generally don't want to put you through unnecessary testing and anxiety, Dr. Iyengar says. So they might rule out several different diagnoses or try other treatments before thinking cancer is the culprit—and that’s perfectly normal.

Gaslighting is something else altogether. The term gets its name from the 1944 film Gaslight, in which a man tries to convince his wife that she is losing it by intentionally causing the lights in their home to flicker while insisting that they are not—basically denying the reality in front of their eyes. In the modern era, the term has become shorthand for instances in which one person (often a man) denies the lived reality of another (often a woman), leading to self-doubt and confusion.

While medical gaslighting isn’t necessarily intentional or nefarious, it can still lead to harm. If your health care provider is doing this, they might…

  • Frequently interrupt you or seem to come to a conclusion before you’ve finished sharing your symptoms

  • Ignore other possible causes, even when treatments don’t help

  • Minimize or downplay your symptoms

  • Seem skeptical or question whether you’re telling the truth

  • Attribute your symptoms to generic things, like mental health or weight, or say they are a “natural part of aging”

Who is most likely to experience medical gaslighting

There are a few factors that really ramp up your chances of experiencing medical gaslighting. One is that you don’t fit the stereotype of what a health care provider thinks a person with those diseases or symptoms “should” look like. Dr. Carter points to a survey of Black people with ALS, which found that a common struggle people faced was overcoming doctors’ ideas of what they thought an ALS patient looked like. “People think of ALS as a ‘white man’s disease,’” says Dr. Carter, and when clinicians get stuck on a certain image, people who don’t fit that pattern have a harder time being believed.

Then there is the dreaded, “You look healthy.” As a teen, doctors told Sarah Elisabeth, now 26, that the problems with her legs were due to growing pains; her bladder and digestion issues were caused by stress (and various mental health conditions); and she was a “whiny” attention seeker. Despite seeing at least a dozen health care professionals and specialists, her symptoms worsened over the years, and she slowly began losing her ability to walk. When she was working at a metal shop and her arm would go numb and she’d drop her tools, her doctor said she “must be sleeping wrong.” Toward the end of 2022 doctors finally discovered the true cause of her ailments: She had tethered spinal cord syndrome, a condition in which the spinal cord stretches abnormally. It was the cause of all her neurological issues, and after she had surgery to fix the problem in 2023, she felt immense relief (and even gained an inch of height in her neck).

What you can do if you think you’re experiencing gaslighting

While you can’t control whether or not a doctor will take your symptoms seriously, there are still things within your control. Here are steps you can take before, during, and after a medical appointment to counter any medical gaslighting.

Do some prep work before appointments.

It’s good to know exactly which points you want to hit with your doctor before you see them, Keisha Bentley-Edwards, PhD, an associate professor in medicine at Duke University School of Medicine, tells SELF. Dr. Iyengar recommends that you don’t recite a litany of symptoms and instead stick to the top three concerning points that you’d like to address. Having clear and concise timelines to share with your providers for when symptoms started and how they progressed, and what treatments have already been tried, is also helpful.

Don’t be afraid to switch providers and ask for a second opinion.

To find a good doctor, tap into your networks, ask your friends if they’re happy with their primary care physicians and see who people have good experiences with. Dr. Bentley-Edwards says that when she’s getting a referral from her doc, she asks them for “someone you would send your favorite sibling to.”

Trust your intuition.

“If you feel like you're not being heard and things are not being taken seriously, you’re probably right,” says Dr. Iyengar. And that baseline feeling is already a sign that maybe you should seek out a different doctor—not necessarily because that first one was definitely wrong, but “what's really important is that you trust your physician, and that you trust that you’re being heard.”

Advocate for yourself—or find someone who can.

When you are dealing with pain, exhaustion, or other symptoms, it can feel so hard to keep pushing for answers. Experts across the board recommend bringing along someone you trust, like a family member, to an appointment. When you’re in pain, “you're not always in the right mindset to advocate for yourself,” says Bastion. That second person can be there to take notes, ask follow-up questions, or to just back you up when you’re being dismissed.

If there’s no one you can bring, Bastion recommends searching for local advocacy groups who might be able to send a volunteer to accompany you. Many hospitals have patient advocates on staff who are mostly trained to access medical records or apply for financial assistance. Alternatively, national groups like the Patient Advocate Foundation, or local organizations like New York’s Community Health Advocates can provide one-on-one assistance navigating health care systems.

Bastion, now 41, looks back at how young they were and how overwhelmed they felt when that cystic tumor was discovered and feels lucky that they didn’t have to go through it alone. “Part of the reason that I feel like I got through this medical gaslighting is because of the people willing to advocate for me,” says Bastion. “They were all just like, ‘No, this is out of bounds, this needs to be dealt with.’”

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Originally Appeared on SELF

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