How to Recognize Medical Gaslighting and Stand Up for Your Health
24 Jul 2024 · 26 min
In this episode of the Beyond Diagnosis podcast, host Rita De Michele interviews board‑certified functional medicine practitioner Claudine Francois to unpack medical gaslighting—especially its prevalence among women. They define medical gaslighting as clinicians dismissing or mischaracterizing patients’ symptoms, often attributing them to menopause, stress, or “being dramatic.” The conversation explores systemic drivers: traditional medicine’s reliance on broad reference ranges, outdated textbooks, and a lack of gender‑specific research. Francois contrasts this with functional medicine’s narrower, “optimal” lab ranges and a root‑cause, whole‑body perspective that seeks the “sweet spot” before a formal diagnosis is made. They discuss common presentations such as chronic fatigue in women aged 40‑60, linking stress‑induced cortisol dominance to hormonal, gut, liver, and mineral imbalances—including the novel insight that chronic stress can cause calcium to be mobilized from bone as a calming mineral, leading to joint pain or calcifications. Practical advocacy strategies are offered: bring an ally to appointments, prepare written notes or relevant PubMed studies, request comprehensive panels (full thyroid, GI‑Map, etc.), and trust one’s own intuition. The episode also outlines immediate and long‑term impacts of gaslighting—persistent symptoms, worsening health, and missed diagnoses—and emphasizes that a diagnosis is not a sentence, as functional interventions can modify disease trajectories. The discussion ends with concrete actions listeners can take in their next medical visit and a call to seek functional practitioners for chronic, complex conditions.
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If you've left a medical appointment feeling dismissed, unheard, frustrated, you're not alone. Medical gaslighting isn't some on-trend catchphrase; it's a real issue that leads to poorer health outcomes, mainly for women. Joining me on the show is no other than Claudine Francois, a board-certified functional medicine practitioner who will be unmasking the truth behind it. And helping you recognize the red flags in your next appointment. Welcome to Beyond Diagnosis, a podcast to raise your awareness, decisions, and voice for alternative practices so you can take back control of your health. I'm Rita De Michele, your host, a mindset and empowerment coach, and the founder of the Onus platform. Join me each week so you can create the health of your dreams. Hi, Claudine.
Hi, Rita. So good to see you.
It's so good to see you and to have you on the show. Well, gaslighting—it's a lot of people talking about it on social media, aren't they?
It is a huge topic.
Yeah, it is. And is, and a lot of people do think it's this new trendy sort of catchphrase that everybody's using. using, but it's actually been around for a really long time, and a lot of people have been experiencing— they just haven't had the words for it or understood what it is. So let's start with, can you explain what is medical gaslighting?
Yeah, absolutely. And you hit the nail on the head where you said people have been experiencing it for a really long time. It's just that we didn't know what it was. So what medical gaslighting is, it's similar to other kinds of gaslighting where you are having an experience and someone is telling you that what you are experiencing isn't what you are experiencing. So when it comes to medical gaslighting, this happens with your health and it mostly happens to women. Not saying it doesn't happen to men, but it happens very commonly with women where they go to a doctor and they say, I'm just feeling exhausted all the time. I have all this fatigue. I can't seem to Do anything anymore. I have this, you know, I don't have my motivation anymore. You know, my, my brain isn't working. They have all these lists of symptoms and the doctor says, you're just going through menopause. You're fine. Here, here, have a pill or just, just go. I've heard the worst things. Just go make love to your husband every once in a while. You'll be fine. You know, just dismissing them, saying that what they're experiencing isn't either, either they're not experiencing or it's not important. Right? You're just complaining. Go, go, you know, get out of my office so I can deal with something actually important.
That is shocking. And you do hear a lot of people say exactly what you've just said. So why does this medical gaslighting happen? Like, why is it? Is it the doctor or is it the system? Why has it— why is that happening?
Well, I mean, it's partially both because the doctors are working within the system, right? They have been trained in the system. And the system, for one thing, it looks at these huge ranges. So I often have clients who, they'll go to the doctor, they'll get their lab tests done. And the ranges are, they're truly just the average of all the people who've taken that test. They don't actually mean anything. They aren't, oh, this is where you want to be. This is where you're going to feel great. It's just this huge range of the average. So it's— someone may be on the outside of, you know, still in the range, but they might be like farther to the right of the range, for example. And the doctor will say, oh, you're within range, you're fine. Well, in functional medicine, we have a much smaller range that we're looking at. We're looking at where do you want to be? And so typically when people are outside the functional range but not yet outside of the traditional range, I call that the sweet spot because that's where you can reverse symptoms and help someone feel better before they get to a place of diagnosis. Because that's what that range on the doctor's labs is for. It's for diagnosing you. Oh, now you have a diagnosis. Now I can give you a pill or I can remove an organ. That's another favorite thing to do, right? Oh, you don't need a gallbladder. Yeah. I don't need a uterus. So, but when it comes to the, the listening part, there's so little research compared to men. There's so little research on women, especially as we age. You know, this period of time from 40s to 60s where we're going through perimenopause, menopause, there's just— I feel like in the functional realm we are learning so much more. There's, there's a lot more research coming out there, but in terms of like the traditional medical sphere They're always going to be about 10 years behind, right? So they're, they're not the, um, the knowledge or the even awareness isn't quite there yet. So the people that are working in that industry, they're just going off of the textbooks they read 20 years ago.
Mm.
It's going to take a while for traditional medicine to catch up to what all the rest of us are figuring out, either on our own or with the help of someone who's more in tune with So how can—
so how can functional medicine— I mean, you have just touched on it with the, uh, looking at a narrower range in the blood tests. So how can functional medicine help people with chronic issues? A lot of our listeners here are people with long-term and chronic conditions that just, again, have been left— you know, they fall through the cracks of the medical system, like you were saying, because they can't find something. They can't pinpoint it. They can't pinpoint and say, you have this, you know. They have too many. My mother had chronic conditions that was quite complex, and I remember her doctor almost shaking her head going, just give me one, you know, just give me one thing. Right. I can't cope with all these, you know, because they can't pinpoint it. So how does Is it because functional medicine looks right back at the root cause as opposed to the Band-Aid, as opposed to the very end? Like, I need you to actually have developed something so I can call it something.
Yeah, that's definitely part of it. Can you please be sick enough for me to diagnose? I know you're not sick enough. I don't know what to do with you. We're laughing, but it's, it's pretty sad. Yes. Um, so on the one hand, if you think about medicine, it's very siloed, right? You have a cardiologist, you have an endocrinologist, you have, you know, a specialist for everything. Whereas in functional medicine, we're looking at this big picture because— and I've heard you say this on the show before— it's not like each part of any part of our body works in a vacuum, right?
Mm-hmm.
It's not like Our thyroid wakes up one day and says, you know what? I need a me day. I'm not going to give you any metabolism anymore. I just, I'm done. Right?
Exactly.
There's something that triggered the thyroid to stop functioning. Right? And it's coming from a different part of the body typically. So looking at the whole picture is definitely maybe part of it. And then as you alluded to, figuring out the root cause, getting to why is this happening? The why is what is missing. In traditional medicine, and it's funny because I was one of those kids who always wanted to know why. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Inquisitive. That way, like you know, I used to work in accounting, and I would go into other businesses, and I would try to change up their accounting systems to make them more efficient. And I would have people tell me, "Well, this is the way it's always been done." And I would say, "Well, why?" And they're like, I don't know, it just is. And I'm like, well, is it helping you to be this way? Right? So getting to the why of the thing is gonna help us. If you don't know why, you can't really fix it. You can just band-aid it, as you mentioned, right? I feel like when you're— and when you're band-aiding it, it's kind of like playing— I don't know if you know that game whack-a-mole that you played at the fair where all the little moles come up and you hit them with a—
Oh, yes.
Mallet, you know, it's like It's when we, we're playing whack-a-mole with our symptoms. It's like, oh, a symptom pops up, slap it down with the pharmaceutical. Another symptom pops up, slap it down with another pharmaceutical. Because we haven't figured out where are all the moles coming from? Why are they here? And until we figure out why they are here, what the body's responding to, you— this is why people end up with 18 different drugs, right? Because you just keep having to slap on, you know, a bandaid on every symptom. To the point where you don't even know where it started anymore. But once we get to that root cause, what is what is the what is making us have all of these symptoms? Then you can address that thing, and slowly all the symptoms start to go away.
Yes, yes, absolutely. That's why I love that root cause. And even when sometimes I've spoken to other functional practitioners as well, when they think they found the root cause. there's something even deeper again, you know. So it is— I love the practice of it. So when people, especially women, because how many times have we heard it's just in your head, it's psychosomatic, um, you're being dramatic, you know. Um, I've had that, I'm sure you've had it, I'm sure many people have had it. How can they protect themselves from that when they're experiencing that in an appointment? How can they protect themselves from it?
Yes, and I will dispel a myth that it's only male doctors who are doing this. There are also— I've heard stories of people going to female doctors where they've done this too, which is interesting to me because the science shows that women typically don't Complain unless it's really bad. Yes, we tend to handle pain really well. I mean, think about it, we birth children. I mean, come on. So yeah, when someone is being gaslit, when they know something's wrong in their body, there are a few things that I would recommend. One is, if you're going back, like let's say it's a second appointment, bring somebody with you. Bring an advocate. It could be your spouse. It could be your best friend. It could be your mother. Like, it could be your, your daughter. Whoever it is, bring someone with you because having that outside perspective can make all the difference. And I'll give you an example. I had a friend who had 3 needless surgeries.
Wow.
So she went into surgery 3 times. Each time they told her, oh, you need to have, you know, oh, we gotta, we gotta do this We got to scrape a bunch of stuff off because we think you have cancer, or, oh, we need to remove this thing because we think you have endometriosis, all these different things. And finally, she went back to the original GI doctor who had sent her to one of these surgeons. And he puts her up on the table. He checks her out. He says, okay, everything's good. She's like, whoa, what do you mean everything's good? You sent me to surgery. We haven't resolved the reason I went in the first place. How can you say everything's good? Well, luckily her husband was there because this guy was just going to tell her like, her husband was there and he put his foot down. He's like, you haven't resolved her problem. Like, what's your deal? So having that extra person there who can really step in and sometimes we can feel overwhelmed when we're at the doctor and we know something is what it is, but we're being told no. So having that advocate's One, definitely a positive thing I've found. But you can always get another opinion. You could get 100 other opinions. I'd heard you say that you've had— when you were having some medical issues, you had to go to person after person after person to find the right person. Yeah. Because maybe the town you live in does not have somebody who thinks this way, right? Maybe they're all traditional medicine. They all have the same, like, oh, just take a pill and be done with it. So finding and doing your research, finding someone who thinks about this the way you think about it. Um, and now, now it's a lot easier, right? Because we have social media, we have the internet, we have podcasts like yours.
Yeah.
We have lots of ways to get the information. So do your research. Um, a girlfriend of mine, she had a terrible thyroid disease to the point where she was like, you know what, I'm giving up. This thing is killing— it wants to kill me. It's fine. It can kill me. And then her— it's a sad story— her brother unexpectedly died.
Oh.
And then she realized, oh gosh, life is precious. I need to figure this out. She basically got a medical degree figuring out her issue. Like, she had to go— she was calling labs to, like, ask them questions like, what does this mean? What do I do about it? Now, luckily, there are plenty of practitioners now That specialize in whatever the thing is. I mean, there's a, there's a sleep specialist, there's a thyroid specialist, there's a SIBO specialist, there's a specialist in pretty much everything. So you can find someone. You just might have to do a little digging. And then know that if you get diagnosed with something, that's not a sentence, right? A lot of us think of, oh, well, I'm diagnosed. That's it, right? I just have to be on this medication forever, or I have to, have to do what the doctor said because I've been diagnosed. But that's not true. There are a lot of things you can do from a functional perspective to shore up your body's reserves. And this is, this is so true with autoimmune disorders because autoimmune disorders are triggered by gut issues.
Hmm.
Right? So there are so many things you can do to not have the flare-up anymore. There, there was just a study recently that talked about 2 things with regards to Parkinson's disease. And the reason why Parkinson's is important to me is because my husband's family, his mother and his father had Parkinson's.
Wow.
But apparently, um, toxins play a big role in Parkinson's. So if you live in an area with high pollution, you have a— like where I live, we have 150% greater chance of Parkinson's disease than anywhere else in the country because of our crazy amount of air pollution. But also how your gut microbiome plays a huge role in whether or not that disease is turned on, right? If you trigger it on. So all of that to say, there are so many options for people now. So trusting your intuition, because you know your body more than a random doctor who's never seen you before. Get another opinion. Do your research. And know that even if you are diagnosed, it's not the end of the road.
Absolutely, absolutely. And it is having that trust and faith that there is, you know, other people like yourself who can help somebody. Because how many people do they get a diagnosis, they're scared out of their wits, and they— and the other thing is they might be scared out of their wits, but they're too fearful or have too much loyalty in the practitioner that their parents saw, that their whole family goes to. How could I possibly leave? I think that that has a really detrimental effect on somebody getting, you know, a, um, a healing, or healing from what they're experiencing. So What are some of the, what are some of the immediate and long-term impacts of this medical gaslighting on patients?
Well, the immediate impact is they don't get whatever it is resolved, right? They just go on feeling awful and thinking, well, this is life, I guess I just have to deal with it. And then the long-term effect is it's kind of like if you don't get your oil changed in your car It's not going to magically get better, right? What happens if you don't change your oil? The thing starts breaking down, it starts overheating, you start having parts that aren't working anymore. Uh, so if you don't fix the problem, you will— you can get to a diagnosis more easily because you're not addressing the problem. So it's just, it's not going to get better, it's going to get worse.
Absolutely. And for— you mentioned about having an advocate with you, and that's one of the things that I help people with as well, is really lifting up their, their empowerment to advocate for themselves. For people who don't have an advocate, what can you do? What can you say to suggest to someone how to advocate for themselves, especially if they're in a medical appointment that is really only 10 minutes? I think that's where a lot of the problem is. We're not demonizing the traditional or the doctors, They have cons— you know, constraints of 10 minutes. How far can you go? How much inquiry can you get it to in 10 minutes? And that's why, especially have chronic or complex conditions, it's so much better to go to a functional doctor who can spend an hour with you. So if someone is in that middle place and they're going, oh my God, I'm not getting what I need, I'm still in the same place, I don't know what to do. You know, I'm a bit nervous about leaving my doctor. How can you— what, what can someone do to help raise their ability to advocate for themselves?
Well, I personally find that having something written down makes it a lot easier. So whether you've taken notes yourself or you've printed something off the internet or you've put together something you can hand to the doctor that they can actually look at and see I mean, you can go to PubMed and see any study. Any medical study is in pubmed.org, and there are tons of studies in there. And the doctors trust that because they know that's the medical repository, but they're so busy. It's not like they're keeping up on every study that's been out there, right? So if you go and you find the relevant study and you say, and you highlight the section, like, look at this section that's relevant to what you're going, you're going to them for. Um, that saves them time. It saves you time explaining. It actually— it legitimizes what you're talking about because this is a source they trust. But basically, having that paper in front of you that they can see, that makes a huge difference, especially in that small amount of time you're allotted.
Absolutely. Within your work, uh, what is the most common condition that you help people with, Claudine?
It's fatigue. Every— so I, I specialize in working with women between 40 and 60, and they are so tired. They're so tired, right? They've been run ragged. They're stressed out all the time. And so when you're stressed out all the time, things— your body's functions stop, start shutting down.
Mm-hmm.
Because the body prioritizes the cortisol response. It's like, oh, well, you obviously need to run away from a tiger. We don't need to digest food. We don't need to pre— create, uh, produce hormones. We don't need to metabolize anything. Like, that's not going to all go on the back burner. We have to run away from the threat.
Exactly.
By the time they come to me, they've been doing this for so long that things are starting to shut down. It's kind of like a power grid. If you think about when, you know, it's 110 degrees, and there's only so much power to go around, right? So start— you start getting blackouts. In certain areas, that's kind of what our body is doing. It's trying to conserve energy because it only has so much. It's like, well, we we need we need to survive more than we need to you know help you fit into your skinny jeans.
Absolutely, absolutely. And is there anything else that so may isn't so it's it's fatigue coming from stress is what you're helping your patients find the root cause to.
So their, their symptom is fatigue. And then we look into, is it, you know, are your, how are your hormones doing? Um, do you have any gut pathogens? Because when we're stressed, immune system doesn't function. So like the door's wide open to all these pathogens, parasites, whatever, that wanna come in through the front door.
Mm-hmm.
Because it's, it's not being manned anymore. Um, but usually hormones, uh, thyroid function, gut issues. Liver congestion. Those are all the, the things that I tend to see on the tests. Yes. Um, the minerals are depleted because when you're stressed, magnesium and potassium are the first to go.
Oh, that's interesting.
Mm-hmm. Some people have calcium shells, like their body has been under so much stress for so long that the body has literally thrown a bunch of calcium at it cuz it's a calming mineral. And so for some people that ends up as joint pain cuz it's a really sharp mineral. Other people get gallstones or kidney stones. Some people get calcification of the arteries because there's calcium where it's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be in your bones, but because we've been so stressed, the body took it out of the bones and just threw it wherever, telling us to calm down, guys, chill out.
That is really interesting. I would never have correlated calcium in that way. I would never have thought I'm so stressed out, so my body is taking calcium from my bones. To help calm my system.
Mm-hmm. Because— crazy, right?
I mean, we're all taught— well, we've all heard that it's taking calcium out of your bones because of osteoarthritis or, you know, one of those conditions. But I've never heard of it in that light, that it's actually taking it because it needs to calm your system down. And then What you're feeling are the end systems, end result of that action. Never heard of that. That is really something new. So that's where—
Absolutely.
That's where the functional medicine approach is different. You're not looking just for disease. You're looking for why has this even started in the first place?
Exactly.
Can you tell our listeners what's one action our listeners could start doing in their very next appointment if they feel they're not being heard, or they, you know, don't want to actually get down to the point of a disease, that would like to, you know, have a more comprehensive blood test, but they're not being listened to?
Yeah, well, I would say the first thing is trust your instincts because you know your body better than anyone else. Do not let someone talk you out of what you know you're feeling. So if you can push for this doctor to give you what you need, whether that's a full thyroid panel, right, which is 8 markers, whether it's a comprehensive blood panel, whatever you need, if it's a GI map, which is a gut test. Push for that thing because you know that's what you need. If that doctor can't get it for you, find somebody else.
Yes.
Sometimes you're just not going to get anywhere with certain doctors, right? And it's— you can try all day long, but do your research. Find somebody who is open, who is looking for the why, who is willing to help you on that journey, because You— it's your body and you need to take care of it. No one else is going to be as good an advocate for your body as you are.
Absolutely. So true. We do— we have to look after ourselves. And honestly, for our listeners who are struggling with chronic conditions, they are struggling to get a, you know, a broader perspective or root cause help They don't want to be on medication, Claudine is the person to see. All of her details will be in the show notes. Please contact her there. Thank you, Claudine, for being on the show.
It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
You're welcome. Thank you. I would love to know what was the biggest insight or Aha moment you got from this interview, so you can now speak up, take action, and make informed decisions for your health. And if you like this episode, get instant access to your free ebook, Alternative Wisdom: Taking Back Control of Your Health, at life-onus.com.
