When doctors tell a patient “It’s all in your head,” that’s medical gaslighting. Here’s how to address an issue that disproportionately impacts the health of women, LGBTQ individuals and the elderly.
When doctors tell a patient “It’s all in your head,” that’s medical gaslighting. Here’s how to address an issue that disproportionately impacts the health of women, LGBTQ individuals and the elderly.
Yes, but that’s different from subjective evidence and I think that’s part of the problem. There’s a difference between somatic symptoms and subjective evidence.
We differentiate between the two all the time without explicitly identifying it as such. “Patient says the feel a lot better this morning” vs. “patient says they still feel rotten” is valid subjective evidence that we really do take under consideration when evaluating treatment response.
Onset, duration, aggravating and alleviating factors, and consistency of reported symptoms are all things that distinguish evidentiary subjective reports from somatic ones. I’ve walked psychotic patients through things that were distressing to them that I knew were somatic. And I’ve caught “real” things where the patient subjective report was really the only indication we had. It IS possible to differentiate.
Granted, this demands more time than the corporations we work for would like to permit us to spend with our patients. Which is a huge part of the problem that we should all be protesting.