"Have you considered that it might be anxiety?"
"A lot of women your age experience this."
"Your tests are normal. There's nothing wrong."
If you've spent any time navigating the healthcare system with an invisible or poorly-understood condition, you've probably heard something like this. And you've probably walked out of an appointment wondering if you were imagining it — which is precisely the problem.
What medical gaslighting actually is
Medical gaslighting is when a patient's symptoms, concerns, or lived experience are dismissed, minimised, or attributed to psychological causes without adequate clinical investigation — often leaving the patient doubting themselves rather than the diagnosis (or lack of one).
It's important to be precise about this. Not all diagnostic uncertainty is gaslighting. Not all wrong answers are gaslighting. Not every doctor who says "I don't know" is gaslighting you.
Medical gaslighting is specifically about the dismissal — the pattern of making the patient feel that their experience is the problem, rather than the medical system's capacity to understand it.
The patterns to recognise
- →Symptoms attributed to anxiety or stress without investigation
- →Being told tests are "normal" when tests were not comprehensive
- →"You look well" used as a clinical assessment
- →Suggestions that the problem is psychological when physical causes haven't been ruled out
- →Being made to feel that asking questions is excessive or difficult
- →Prior records being ignored or not read
- →Symptoms being attributed to weight, age, or gender without clinical basis
Why it happens — and why it's not always malicious
Medical education historically prepared clinicians to treat acute conditions with clear presentations. Chronic, complex, multi-system conditions — especially ones that are poorly understood or disproportionately affect certain demographics — fall outside that training. When something doesn't fit a known pattern, the path of least resistance is to locate the problem in the patient.
This doesn't make it acceptable. But understanding why it happens can help you navigate it more effectively — because the goal isn't to win an argument, it's to get appropriate care.
What gaslighting does to you
The sustained effects of medical gaslighting are serious and underacknowledged. Years of being told your symptoms aren't real — or are your fault — shapes how you relate to your own body. Many people with conditions like ME/CFS, POTS, MCAS, and fibromyalgia spend years assuming they're the problem. They delay seeking help, minimise their symptoms even to themselves, and lose trust in their own perception.
This is the most corrosive part. The medical system makes you doubt your own body.
“Being disbelieved by a clinician isn't just a bad appointment. It's a message about whose experience counts.”
What you can actually do
Documentation is your first line of defence. Symptom logs, appointment notes, records of what was raised and what was dismissed. Over time, this becomes a clinical record that's harder to dismiss than a verbal account in a ten-minute appointment.
Specific language helps. "I'd like this documented in my records" changes the dynamic. A clinician who knows something is on record behaves differently than one who's just managing a conversation.
Specialist referrals, second opinions, and patient-led organisations can all help — particularly for conditions where specialist knowledge is significantly ahead of general practice knowledge.
And: you are allowed to change doctors. This sounds obvious. For many people with chronic illness, who are dependent on a particular practice, particular prescriber, or particular referral network, it isn't simple. But it is a right.
Spooniversity's Patient Advocate track teaches medical communication, documentation strategies, and how to navigate systems that weren't designed for you. Denialbuster.org is Roi Shternin's dedicated platform for fighting medical gaslighting specifically.