When doctors don’t believe their patients’ pain – experts explain the all-too-common experience of medical gaslighting

Many patients worldwide experience medical gaslighting – a social phenomenon where a patient’s health concerns are not given appropriate medical evaluation and are instead downplayed, misattributed or dismissed outright. Medical gaslighting is rooted in centuries of gender bias in medicine. Women’s reproductive health issues have long been dismissed as psychological or “hysterical.” Genital and pelvic pain especially has been misattributed to psychological rather than biological causes: A century ago, Freudian psychoanalysts incorrectly believed that female sexual pain came from psychological complexes like penis envy.