Gaslighting: A term that has become synonymous with toxic relationships.
Most often it is used to describe a partner’s behavior: actions that tempt a person to question their own judgment.
Today the word is widely used on Instagram and Twitter to highlight emotional abuse, and domestic abuse charities in the US and Britain recognize the phenomenon as a tool of manipulation.
But readers may be less familiar with the term medical gaslighting and its telltale signs.
The concept – meaning: a A medical professional ignores or downplays a patient’s physical symptoms – was widely discussed last week, following new reports about the circumstances of Hollywood actor Sharon Stone’s stroke.
The Basic Instinct star revealed to Fashion Doctors initially didn’t believe her after she suffered a nine-day brain hemorrhage and stroke in 2001.
Actress Sharon Stone recently revealed to Vogue that doctors were initially disbelieving after she suffered a nine-day brain hemorrhage and stroke in 2001.
She suffered a ruptured vertebral artery, which led to a cerebral hemorrhage. The problem is usually caused by trauma, such as a fall, but it can also happen for no apparent reason.
The actor said doctors missed the signs on her first CT scan and “decided I was faking it.”
It was only after her best friend persuaded them to give her a second one that they discovered she had a brain haemorrhage.
‘My vertebral artery was torn. “I would have died if they had sent me home,” she said.
“What I learned through that experience is that women are often just not heard in a medical setting, especially if you don’t have a female doctor.”
DailyMail.com has discovered that Sharon Stone’s experience is not rare. In fact, some studies suggest that up to 70 percent of American women have experienced medical gaslighting.
And it seems like women are increasingly wanting to talk about it. Search #MedicalGaslighting on TikTok and you’ll see that the selection of videos has been viewed approximately 222 million times.
But how do you know if it’s happening to you; and what can you do about it?
Clinical psychologist Dr. Kelly E. Green often sees the impact of medical gaslighting on her patients.
“I see serious health anxiety in many of my clients; many are dismissed as hypochondriacs.”
The effects, she says, are “even more extreme” than gaslighting in other types of relationships because “physicians, physicians and nurses are in a position of high esteem and power in society.” They are familiar.
Clinical psychologist Dr Kelly E Green said her daughter was gaslighted by medical professionals for a year and a half
“Patients start to doubt themselves,” she adds. ‘Not only about their pain, but also about their own other forms of judgment. They think: If I’m wrong about this, am I also wrong about the other thing?
“Because they’re not believed, they become more focused on gathering evidence, and so they become more focused on their body… on every symptom, everything that feels abnormal, because they’re trying to get someone to believe them. . If you say to someone, ‘Oh no, that’s not the case,’ they’ll come up with all kinds of reasons why that’s the case.”
Dr. Green said this can lead to “catastrophic thinking and depression.”
She adds: ‘Often also isolation, because if you are so focused on your physical pain and medical complaints, you don’t feel like going out, you don’t feel like being social, you don’t feel like caring for others. parts of your life, otherwise you might not even be able to do that, but you don’t know why.’
One patient who knows all too well the devastation of medical gaslighting is Dr. Green’s daughter, who suffers from a genetic connective tissue syndrome that causes extreme pain and mobility problems.
But for over a year, the condition was dismissed as “just anxiety.” The ordeal began when her daughter was seven years old and began complaining of severe pain.
Dr. Green told DailyMail.com: ‘There would be days where she would say she couldn’t walk because she was in so much pain, or she would fall a bit and end up thinking she had broken something.’
‘There was so much unexplained pain that some days she would wake up and burst into tears and say she just couldn’t do it.
“So we went to the ER, we had x-rays done, sometimes they found something, sometimes they didn’t.
“But usually they would send us home, saying she was overreacting, or that she was trying to get out of school, or that it was fictional.”
This lasted about a year and a half, Dr. Green said, until she made a final appointment to see if her daughter had arthritis.
Shortly afterwards, she was diagnosed with hypermobile Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a rare genetic condition that explained all of her symptoms.
Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos syndrome is a rare condition that affects the connective tissue. Symptoms include loose, unstable joints that dislocate easily, joint pain and extreme fatigue.
“Everything has changed since we got her diagnosis,” Dr. Green said. ‘We got her the right therapy, we got her school accommodation and we were able to explain to her teachers what was going on.
‘There were still days when she couldn’t walk, but we had a wheelchair. We were actually able to deal with it as a physical medical condition, rather than not knowing what was going on because everyone said it was nothing.”
She adds, “One of the things doctors learn is that if it looks like a horse and sounds like it’s a horse, it’s probably a horse. But sometimes it’s not a horse, sometimes it’s a zebra.’
In some cases, medical gaslighting can be life-threatening. This was the case for 50-year-old Sherri Rollins from North Carolina.
The mother of two was diagnosed with colorectal cancer twice before the age of 50, but suffered subtle symptoms such as back pain, weight loss and gas, which doctors initially blamed on her ‘hypersensitivity’.
Ms. Rollins began experiencing back pain in 2017. Although scans showed a lesion in her liver, a gastroenterologist told her it was nothing to worry about.
However, when she went to another doctor for an MRI a few months later, she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer; the disease had spread to her liver. Ms Rollins underwent chemotherapy treatment for about a year before undergoing surgery.
She was in remission for four years before she started having symptoms again: rapid weight loss and painful gas.
Ms. Rollins had tumors in her liver, rectum and pelvic floor. She underwent chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. She now encourages others to speak up if they feel something is wrong
Up until that point, Ms Rollins’ regular scans had shown up clearly, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.
Her oncologist told her, “I can assure you that you do not have cancer. You’re oversensitive.’
However, in March 2022, doctors discovered a tumor in her rectum that had spread to her pelvic floor.
“I felt abandoned,” she said.
Mrs Rollins underwent high-dose radiotherapy, surgery and had an ileostomy, an opening in the abdomen where a piece of the small intestine is moved outside the abdominal wall, for three months to create a stoma.
Ms. Rollins still has some lingering effects from the treatment, such as nerve damage in her hands. She now encourages others to speak up if they feel something is wrong.
She said: ‘I hope that even if one person advocates for more treatment options and makes it through, that’s why I speak out.
“Being your own advocate doesn’t mean you’re a dissatisfied patient.”