Trustworthiness, earnestness, and altruism are all traits we’re meant to believe are accurate when describing the care received from our healthcare providers, but what happens when this isn’t the case?
Across the nation, physicians and healthcare professionals are responsible for maintaining a pivotal role in saving lives and shaping the way we seek medical guidance and the public’s perception of modern medicine’s capabilities. Some may even go as far as to call them superheroes.
It goes without question that, in pursuing such a title, empathy and impression are key determinants for driving the crucial relationships built between patients and their providers. Instilling them with our trust becomes invaluable when it comes at the expense of our health and longevity.
We label them superheroes, yet countless underserved communities remain unaccounted for, receiving misguided advice in their prognosis perils. We are promised state-of-the-art explanations and solutions in a country supposedly “leading the race” in medical innovation. Unfortunately, these desperate needs remain unmet in an ever-growing economy.
In 2025 America, a value is put on patients’ trust and honesty. If you’re lucky enough, it’s expendable at the monthly rate of your insurance providers. From the perspective of protecting women’s health, these aspects continue to become exploited in an all-too-familiar reality for thousands of overlooked women. Being recently dubbed as “Medical Gaslighting,” the conceptual malpractice of dismissing patients’ concerns is taking over the medical field, and it’s leaving countless women misguided, misdiagnosed, and wholly misunderstood, stripping them of their access to real healthcare.
Defining Medical Gaslighting
“An act that invalidates a patient’s genuine clinical concern without proper medical evaluation…”
The American Journal of Medicine’s definition of “Medical Gaslighting”
An October 2024 commentary taken from The American Journal of Medicine (AMJMed) expanded on the definition of “Medical Gaslighting,” adding that the conceptual malpractice stems from “Physician ignorance, implicit bias, or medical paternalism.”
Differing from the more colloquial definition of gaslighting, the rooted nature of Medical Gaslighting from healthcare professionals is usually unintentional. As AMJMed describes, in contrast to purposeful manipulation, instances of dismissing clinical concerns may be primarily caused by a lack of awareness, unfamiliarity with certain presentations of diseases, or even inadvertent systemic social influence.
The term was first used in recognized medical literature just five years ago following the outbreak of COVID-19. An article published by the peer-reviewed medical journal JAMA Network recounts the input of Hanna Lockman, a 32-year-old woman who suffered months-long symptoms tied to the virus and hopeless misdirection from her providers.
Dissecting Lockman’s case, she experienced the instance of medical gaslighting amidst the peak of COVID-19, dating back to March 2020. Lockman recalls experiencing symptoms of “sudden stabbing pains” in her chest, accompanied by visceral pain, dry cough, and mild fever spells. These are all primitive conditions highly associated with COVID-19 — which Lockman had firmly suspected she was initially infected with.
Despite this, when seeking medical advice, Lockman was met with dismissions of her intuition from multiple physicians and healthcare professionals. According to the JAMA Network, “she wasn’t sick enough or old enough to get one of the then-scarce tests for SARS-CoV-2.”
Ergo, her concerns were deemed invalid to be considered for COVID-19.
But after 16 emergency department trips, three hospitalizations, and five months filled with self-advocation and seeking out second opinions, it was finally deduced that Lockman’s intuition was correct — her fatal symptoms were the effects of severe COVID-19 infection.
As Lockman put it, “We’ve experienced so much medical gaslighting; doctors telling us, ‘That’s not what you have. It’s just anxiety.'” She expressed her frustration over the inaccessibility she faced in the healthcare field, resonating with the millions of other unassuming patients who were likewise reliant on governmental healthcare systems.
While the term “Medical Gaslighting” may have only been recently defined in Lockman’s circumstance, the concept of medical gaslighting has contaminated the medical field for ages at the expense and exploitation of lives that are meant to be saved. We see this through the lens of race, age, disability, sex, and gender, to name a few.
In the context of the generally patriarchal-leaning society, the field of women’s health is known to be particularly disadvantaged, even still being incredibly hackneyed with themes of medical gaslighting.
Medical Gaslighting’s Impact on Women’s Health
So, if medical gaslighting is understood to be the false dismissing, diagnosing, and mistreatment of patients’ medical concerns, how do we see these themes carried out in women’s health?
As described by Northwell Health, it comes as no surprise that the biggest areas where women fall victim to this are when dealing with reproductive health, chronic illnesses, and cardiovascular health.
In fact, a 2024 survey from Higgs LLP found that out of 500 women, 24% of women reported a history of experiencing misdiagnosis of gynecological conditions. Of these gynecological conditions, the most common were endometriosis, PCOS, pregnancy, ovarian cysts, and even period pain. In terms of this percentage being representative of the entire female population in the U.S., that’s over 40 million women being misdirected by their medical providers.
More light has been shed on the malpractice of medical gaslighting in recent years. It’s a common conception for patients to already have an instilled bias that their healthcare provider may not always have their best interest in mind. The Mira Fertility Journal reported that between 2021 and 2023, 72% of millennial females felt gaslit by a medical professional.
Medical professionals resonating with Lockman and similar patients believe that patients “aren’t always taken seriously, especially if they’re women, harkening back to the era when ‘female troubles’ were written off as hysteria,” according to the JAMA Network.
MD and pulmonary specialist Jessica Dean adds, “There is definitely gender bias… women with persistent symptoms are more likely than men to be viewed as ‘dramatic and anxious.'”
While it’s already been established that gaslighting in the medical context may not always be rooted in ill-intention by healthcare professionals alike, the concept raises questions about how this negatively shapes the crucial impressions reserved in patients.
What happened to believing in our modern-day superheroes?
As previously mentioned, the degree of medical gaslighting is largely accredited to inadvertent systemic social influence by medical professionals. The “social influence” in question is outdated misconceptions of women’s health and autonomy that are still indirectly followed in existing healthcare systems.
Chalked up as “unintentional,” medical gaslighting has shaped public perception of governmental healthcare systems. The responsibility once held by medical practitioners to foster trust is now undermined, raising questions about the authenticity of modern medical practices.
This only further highlights the urgency that healthcare professionals need to maintain the genuinely integral and altruistic traits that symbolize the medical field. These morals are essential. The best medical providers will always prioritize your health and well-being as expected.