A recorded conversation (YouTube video) featuring Robert Whitfield MD discussing why patients often feel gaslighted by medical professionals. Key points in this chunk: clinicians find it difficult to always know what is happening for patients; effective listening sometimes requires paying attention to what patients don't say; patients frequently feel they are not believed, which contributes to perceptions of gaslighting; diagnostic labels (e.g., fibromyalgia, migraine, chronic fatigue) are often treated as endpoints rather than starting points for care.
Chapters
The patients are super frustrated because they've talked to providers, and I don't think any provider ever wants not understand what's going on. Super frustrating when you don't. But if you're faced with a group of patients like we have all the time, pretty rare that you're going to know exactly what's going on, like, all the time. So you got to get, you know, wrap your head around that. And that can be a challenge. Then you have to be like, super, like you are, you know, used to listening. And then you'll be like, ah, yeah, that makes sense. So now it's the opposite. Like, instead of listening for clues, you have to listen to what's not being said.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, I think the. The other thing that obviously leads to so much problems is people feeling like there's gaslighting or other things that have happened in the medical community where they're not being believed or understood. And I think one of the other things, and I imagine you see this and, you know, a lot of your work too, which is, you know, that diagnostic say label being the end point for people. And I think so many times people get like, the fibromyalgia diagnosis, the migraine diagnosis, the chronic fatigue, you know, all these types of diagnosis, whether they're a conglomeration of, you know, symptoms like a syndrome or a true diagnostic. And it's like the end points, right?
