Gaslighting in healthcare

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I was gaslighted for years by the NHS, until I started being firm & began flat out telling doctors that they were wrong about various issues - and giving in depth explanations for why they were wrong. At first I was not able to verbalise my thoughts, for many years, and ended up bringing long passages of writing, on a4 paper to bring to the GP's surgery, to demand I be attended to properly:

Article below:

https://www.swlondoner.co.uk/life/23022022-gaslighting-in-healthcare-why-is-it-an-issue

It is easy to expect that to not happen in a civilized and educated society.
Yet when Kathy and I were together in the late 1990s and early 2000s I saw it happen to her even with me there.
Crazy.

Yep. Sadly, badly performing and often ill-educated nurses, reassure patients when they really don't have a clue what they are doing or what they are talking about.

I have had to educate nurses withiin the NHS countless times, because they say things that are blatantly out of kilter with scientific literature - and it is because they follow NHS guidelines, which are always lagging behind the cutting edge scientific literature, as well.

And even when NHS guidelines are up to date, they only approximate what is best in terms of their guidelines, and often this is in line with funding and money, not in line with a patients' best interests in terms of the quality of a patients care.

I like how they use the term medical gaslighting to separate it from actual gas lighting. To me it looks like the doctors don't always know what is going on with the patient, don't understand the symptoms, and also if you see a male doctor as a female patient, they might not understand issues you are dealing with that have to do with menopause or periods or hormones so it makes since why women may prefer female doctors. I have been asked over the phone when making an appointment "Are you okay with seeing a male doctor?"

My mom went through with with me as a baby because my symptoms kept being downplayed and normalized and my mom kept being told "Just ignore it, it will go away." My parents finally had to go to a lawyer (a friend of my dad's) and he wrote them a letter demanding for a referral or they sue.

And also doctors like to save money so they might not want to do tests right away so they would rather have you lose weight first or try other things first. I really don't think doctors are being malicious here and trying to abuse their patients or that would be malpractice. That is why you go for a second opinion.

Yep. Insurance is a sticking point, even within socialist healthcare systems. Somebody has to be responsible for a patient, and often it falls to just one doctor, if it is a consultant in a hospital within the NHS.

Problems arise when you are passed from one consultant to another, because then the new consultant might be taking on a patient that they have never seen before and because of how badly run the NHS is - letters from one consultant often do not reside on the same system as a different consultant from a different clinic.

So you leave things in their hands, expecting things to be okay... then they turn out not to be okay when you request a medicine that the new consultant has no knowledge of based on his or her system that gives him or her limited information about a patient.

The NHS stinks in its current form.

The concept is excellent - the execution poor.

A lot of GP practices have awful communication with doctors and are sometimes even unnecessarily obsructive about giving appropriate medicines in tandem with doctors from hospitals.

The problems are endless when you actually witness the NHS from the inside.

My GP's practice doesn't even have a male nurse available... and I am extremely uneasy around female nurses. So if I want my blood drawn which is necessary for some medications I have taken - I have to allow a female nurse put a needle in my arm.

The attitude from the NHS is "you get what you are given."

I had a GP for a few years who always made me feel like a hypochondriac every time I went to his surgery. It was strange - initially he'd actually been the one to convince me that a couple of dizzy spells I'd had might be down to stress, and he was quite supportive and concerned while I'd been stoical about it. He invited me to his stress clinic and we had a few sessions where we discussed the problems in my life. When problems in the workplace came up, he said my bosses were bastards, and when I didn't respond to that comment he blushed. I remember thinking after the sessions were finished that I may have rather taken over the agenda - at the time I was very into client-centred therapy, and thought that was what the sessions were about. But maybe I alienated him by talking at him too much.

Whatever the reason, he seemed to turn after that. I started having problems with the bullying bosses at work and I went to see him about the stress it was causing me. I didn't particularly need a sick note because we could self-certify for a couple of weeks, and I hadn't asked for one, but he suddenly started telling me that he wasn't going to give me any time off, that the world was a cruel place, and that I needed to just go and fight them back. At that point I lost my temper with him.

After that, practically every time I went to see him I came back empty-handed. I got alapecia and he said there wasn't anything worth trying and that it was probably never going to get better. He offered me counselling to help me come to terms with it. He also said that stress sometimes caused alapecia, and then he told me that it might be a sign of cancer. No offer of cancer checks followed, so I later wondered, what was the use of telling me that, as it would be bound to increase my stress levels? When it got better by itself I went back and told him happily that it had been a case of spontaneous remission. He looked completely unimpressed and non-empathic.

Another time I had a bad case of flu, and he told me it was nothing compared with the diseases they get in India where medical help isn't so easy to get (not that he was Indian). I wish I'd thought to say "yes but this is the UK and the NHS is supposed to take a bad case of flu a bit more seriously than they might in India." Back in the day, I remember a doctor getting annoyed with me for waiting too long to get help when I'd had a milder dose of flu than this one.

Then there was the time I went to get a lump looked at, and after saying they couldn't feel anything and dismissing the whole thing, they captured the agenda and started nagging me about smoking. I told them I was gradually quitting, and showed them the nicotine gum I was using. They said I was just playing at quitting and needed to do it properly, and offered to sign me up to their stop-smoking scheme, which was based on nicotine gum and some extracted promise from the patient to quit in a month. I didn't take up the offer. I later heard that the GP got a payment for every patient they got signed up on the scheme.

I don't know if any of that could really be called gaslighting. I think they're pushed for resources these days, and some of the doctors who don't much care about their patients will say anything to get rid of a patient if it isn't a matter of life and death. If that means implying the patient is a hypochondriac, so be it. If it means discouraging the patient from seeking thorough treatment, so be it. If it means keeping quiet about the more expensive options, so be it.

I was told that my Autism concerns were psychosomatic (in my head and imaginary) - in 2008. Fast forward to 2017 with a proper Autism clinic and I was diagnosed as clearly on the spectrum.

There are good doctors and bad doctors.

Some have poor work ethic or have personal problems, like drug addictions.

Others are outstanding.

You really don't have a choice of doctors under the NHS, so if you have a poor performing selection of doctors', who are overworked and overburdened, then you get the most ridiculously under-par healthcare.

My ass could produce better healthcare than I have received than from the NHS.

My mom had cancer and she came homer from work and took off her clothes and found a lump on her thigh. My dad saw it and my mom was going to make an appointment but my dad was adamant to take her to ER. He would not take no for an answer so he drove her an hour away back to where she worked (she is a nurse) and he took her into ER and they examined it and it turned out she had cancer. My mom realized she had signs of it since early 2009 and she realized if she had gone in any sooner, doctors would have dismissed it telling her she is only tired because of her age and she has been working too hard so she is just exhausted and needed more sleep. You basically need to be worse enough for doctors to take you seriously.

My uncle also had cancer and he would go to the doctor only to be told "oh you are just constipated" and his other symptoms were dismissed even though he had pain. Then one day in his home, he fell on the floor in his kitchen and couldn't move so he called 911 and the ambulance came. They took him to the nearest hospital and then he had to be flown to another hospital an hour away since they had more care for him down there. They also diagnosed with with cancer but it was too far spread for them to do anything about it so they gave him pain killers to numb the pain and he died 4 days later. Of course my mom told me we do not know what information he was giving the doctors or maybe he had quit going after being dismissed.

Aren't there private doctors in the UK and from my understanding, you won't be given an outrageous medical bill like you would in the US. At least even some conservatives knowledge they do not think hospitals should be price gouging their patients for healthcare but yet they were still against universal healthcare and said the issue is with healthcare price gouging their patients which needs to change.

The prices for private care in the United Kingdom are very good and the difference in quality between private & universal healthcare for mental health/neurological issues is enormous, in my experience.

If people can get free treatment from the State, that would tend to keep private prices down. It's the same argument for pirating CDs and movies.

My limited experience suggests that the private sector in the UK behaves more as if "the customer is always right" than in the US, from a patient experience point of view.

My father in the UK bought a hip replacement because the NHS at the time was making him wait way too long. The NHS was even dragging its feet about palliative care - i.e. finding effective pain killers. He could barely sleep for the pain at night. They'd been mis-diagnosing it as "worn discs" which we suspect was their way of keeping the waiting list for hip replacements down, and it was only by chance that a physiotherapist treating him for that became suspicious that the DX was wrong that the true ailment was discovered. Suddenly when he went private everything changed - prompt treatment, room service after the op. I've seen the US counterpart where they routinely barge into your room in the middle of the night and snap the lights on full blast.

Another matter I dislike - so far I've only seen this in the US - is the way they fragment the outpatient sessions and GP visits. You go in, you wait, they put you in a room, you wait, a minion comes in, weighs you and asks you a few questions, they leave, you wait, another minion comes in and does something else, they leave, you wait, finally the actual doctor turns up and actually does what you went there to get done. Then, even if you don't have a follow-up appointment to set up, you can't leave till you've squared your account with the admin people. All this because they can't bear to see a qualified, well-paid person doing a minute's worth of work on something that a low-paid minion could do. At least in the UK (last time I looked), you just wait a while and then go straight in to see the actual doctor.

My Dad was gaslighted as a kid. He had Perthes disease & was told he was making it up and that he was walking as if he was a cowboy and that he had copied that behaviour from the cowboy movies he viewed at the cinema, back in the 1960's?

When his Perthes disease was discovered (a childhood hip disorder), he was then told he would be in a wheelchair by the age of 40.

He is now 67 and drives a double-decker bus.

Moral of the story: Doctors' talk nonsense, thinking their patients are gullible and uneducated, and most of the time they are not wrong about that.

The best thing you can do is tell your doctor what to do and you can only do that by researching things beyond a medical doctors' level of research, which involves gaining at least MSc research skills for a regular person.

I am Autistic, so I was already doing this straight after gaining a bachelor's degree (with honours).

[Medical] doctor's are not PhD's, they don't even have a research degree. Their degree is a professional degree which means it is designed to be practical.

Last edited by blitzkrieg on 28 Feb 2022, 9:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have friends of friends who are medical doctors and their exams are more about rote memory and doing basic practical tasks regarding medical procedures, and then they can specialise in something like being a GP, or a psychiatrist, or whatever.

A research degree is something which allows you to understand new concepts from a research perspective, which allows you to be ahead of anything you like really if you have the brains to compute all of the necessary information in a given academic field.

PhD > medical degree in terms of research capability.

Medical degree > PhD in terms of earning potential & applied skills.

P.S, if you are in the United Kingdom and are reading up to date research from the United States regarding medicine, then you are about 10 years in the future, since the United Kingdom has poor research funding versus the United States.

If your doctor in the United Kingdom graduated in 2010, then they are 12 years behind your current date research in 2022 (from a UK perspective), and 22 years behind your research if you are reading scientific literature fresh out of the U.S

So uh yeah, you can imagine how much worse it gets for older doctors'.

They don't know anything.

Last edited by blitzkrieg on 28 Feb 2022, 9:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Doctors are repeatedly telling me that my glucose is perfectly normal, while my home glucose meters show pre-diabetic numbers. Do you think this is also an example of gaslighting?