How many times have you been to the doctor with a concern and been told “it’s probably just stress” or “you’re overreacting”? I went to my obgyn with (what I know now) was post-partum depression, and her recommendation was to “just have more sex” to recalibrate my hormones.
This is medical gaslighting – when a healthcare provider minimizes, dismisses, or psychologizes symptoms rather than investigating them. Because patients have historically trusted the expertise of their doctors, these interactions then cause patients to question the validity of their own experience.
Women are more likely to be misdiagnosed, or to receive a mental health diagnosis instead of a biomedical one, and for their pain to be under-treated. Women of color, women with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community experience even higher rates of dismissal.
The outcome is that women stop seeking care, switch providers, or live with untreated symptoms. This cascades into later diagnoses, disease progression, and preventable complications.
As awareness grows, will we see improvements? On average, studies suggest it can take around 17 years for research evidence to be widely adopted in practice. Physician education needs to be addressed before we can expect changes in clinical practice.
However, a growing number of digital solutions means that women are increasingly armed with insights to inform their interactions with physicians. When combined with emerging technologies, that wealth of health information has the potential to radically transform care in the future. For example, Oura has built a custom LLM specifically for women’s health, which evaluates the biometric data against a library of clinical research. Their goal is education, facilitating conversations with clinicians, and ultimately enabling patients to take informed action with their own data.
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