McCall McPhersonFounder, Modern Thyroid Clinic.

Medical Gaslighting: Why Women's Health Concerns Are Ignored #shorts

6 Feb 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:53

In this YouTube short, a clinician (Speaker B) describes how women—especially high‑achieving, busy mothers—often present with vague but debilitating symptoms such as brain fog, chronic fatigue, and memory lapses. He shares a personal anecdote about his wife's five‑year struggle with a debilitating illness that was repeatedly dismissed as "stress" or "being a mom". The conversation highlights the broader phenomenon of medical gaslighting, where patients' complaints are overlooked, leading to delayed diagnoses; McCall McPherson adds that women are, on average, diagnosed with the same cancers five years later than men. The speaker emphasizes that while life stressors exist, they should not excuse clinicians from listening, noting that thorough listening can allow underlying conditions to reveal themselves. The short underscores systemic bias against women and at‑risk populations in healthcare.

Chapters

Medical gasoline. Basically you come in with these symptoms and a lot of my female patients, it might be brain fog. You lose like, you know, very type A, high producing women who have had a couple kids, now they can't remember what they did. You know, they used to remember what they did in childhood, now they can't remember what they did like a week ago. Waking up tired, exhausted all day long. My wife actually had a crazy debilitating illness for five years where literally she struggled every day. I'd come home and she just collapse, you know, and you have this and just kind of work through it and then you're like, ah, you know, it's just, you're stressed. It's just stress. It's just. It's hard being a mom. It's hard. It's hard. It's so hard. It's just so hard. It's very hard. I'm like, yeah, it's hard. But what else is going on besides, you know, we're a lot less aggressive now. But it's interesting how the medical gas line happens, that occurs and it unfortunately tends to affect women and at risk populations more so than men.
And I think too, you know, it always comes to mind with women, aren't women diagnosed five years later than men for cancer? On average the same type of cancer? Because we go in and we're just sort of dismissed for quite some time.
So all of a sudden now like our system, when you see people interacting with the system more, they get ignored, it get overlooked and all you're stressed and you don't sleep and you know, life is stressful, it's true, but it doesn't mean you ignore people's complaints. And that's one of the things that I've learned over the years, is listen to people. I was taught medical school, if you listen to a person long enough, whatever's going on will declare itself.