Excerpt from CNN 

Editor’s note: Diane O’Leary is a philosopher of medicine and a 2023 Public Voices Fellow on Advancing the Rights of Women and Girls with the OpEd Project and Equality Now. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.

Frustration over medical gaslighting is heating up again, with more than 262 million views for #medicalgaslighting on TikTok. What we see in this stream of thousands of posts on social media are firsthand stories from patients, mostly women, who say doctors have ignored, minimized or dismissed their symptoms as stress or anxiety, often with severe consequences.

The metaphor of gaslighting arises from a 1944 film by that name, where a husband, Charles Boyer, sets out to convince his wife, Ingrid Bergman, that she can’t trust her own thoughts and experiences. In medicine, the term applies when doctors proceed as if patients’ reports of pain or disability are not credible enough to warrant action —but the stakes are far higher than they were for Bergman in the film. In the thousands of stories shared in the recent viral trend, patients report that their perspectives on the situation were indeed credible, and doctors’ failure to respect that led to medical harm.

Aside from likes, clicks and ad sales, these cycles of public frustration have had no systemic impact. We still don’t have a scientific study that determines how often women face this problem. In fact, according to the National Library of Health, a search for “medical gaslighting” yields only four articles related to patients’ health care experiences in the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed database.

Neither the American Medical Association nor the National Institutes of Health has a program to address, or even understand the nature of the problem, and neither do leading medical centers such as Johns Hopkins or the Mayo Clinic. And though gender equity is a common theme now in medical and governmental health organizations, it centers on women’s obstacles getting to the doctor, not the obstacles we face once we’re there.