Long covid and medical gaslighting: Dismissal, delayed diagnosis, and deferred treatment, 2022, Au et al

Highlights

• Long Covid patients use language of gaslighting to describe physicians interactions.
• Online survey shows experiences of dismissal, delayed diagnosis, and deferred treatment.
• Medical gaslighting likely exacerbated by social inequalities in the United States.

Abstract

While we know a lot more about Long Covid today, patients who were infected with Covid-19 early on in the pandemic and developed Long Covid had to contend with medical professionals who lacked awareness of the potential for extended complications from Covid-19. Long Covid patients have responded by labeling their contentious interactions with medical professionals, organizations, and the broader medical system as “gaslighting.”

We argue that the charge of medical gaslighting can be understood as a form of ontological politics. Not only do patients demand that their version of reality be recognized, but they also blame the experts who hold gatekeeping power over their medical care for producing a distorted version of said reality. By analyzing results from an online survey of Long Covid patients active on social media in the United States (n = 334), we find that experiences of contention and their reframing as “gaslighting” were common amongst our respondents. In short answer responses about their experience obtaining medical care for Long Covid, our respondents described encountering medical professionals who dismissed their experience, leading to lengthy diagnostic odysseys and lack of treatment options for Long Covid. Even though we are limited by characteristics of our sample, there is good reason to believe that these experiences and their contentious reframing as medical gaslighting are exacerbated by gender, class, and racial inequalities.

Open access, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667321522001299

 

The sins of the past repeated with ME/CFS. Given the response on the medicine reddit sub on these types of conditions and their own co morbidities there is no question this is happening and it appears to me to be how 95% of doctors view their patients, as fakers. Medicine appears to not yet have learnt anything about chronically ill patient and even the pandemic and the news and most people getting behind Long Covid as a condition has changed their opinion, they are completely out of step with the rest of us.

 

That's the thing, doctors don't change their opinion based on what the public thinks, they call the shots and don't listen to anyone except themselves. Change has to happen from within, you can't expect to be able to put pressure on them from the outside. I don't know how to make that happen though.