When Medicine Stops Listening: The Hidden Crisis of Medical Gaslighting

When patients seek care but leave feeling unheard, the harm is more than medical. This blog examines medical gaslighting as a form of healthcare inequality and asks what happens when medicine stops listening.

“I made the decision that they’re not going to kill my wife.”

Dion Tarkowski’s words capture a terrifying reality: sometimes patients must be rescued from the very system meant to heal them. For four days, he and his wife Angela sought help for her debilitating headaches at an Alberta hospital. Four days of being labeled a drug seeker. Four days of refused testing. When Dion finally drove her to a different hospital, doctors told him the truth that haunts them still, had he waited 24 more hours, Angela would have died from her brain bleed.

This is medical gaslighting. And it’s happening from coast to coast to coast.

From Burnaby to Charlottetown, from Baker Lake to Kingston, Canadians are sharing stories that reveal a healthcare crisis hiding in plain sight. When the University of Windsor’s HEAL Lab launched a survey expecting 50 responses, they received 1,500 heartbreaking testimonies, so overwhelming that researchers had to take breaks from reading. The pain was too heavy to bear all at once.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re a pattern of systemic failure that disproportionately harms women, Black patients, Indigenous people, and minorities. Research confirms what patients have known all along: false beliefs about pain tolerance, particularly the myth that Black people feel less pain, are encoded into medical education and practice. As Monique Curci from Winnipeg says, “I feel the color of my skin when I go into appointments.”

The consequences are devastating. Eileen Davidson suffered six years with undiagnosed rheumatoid arthritis, her pain dismissed as mental health issues and weight problems, while permanent damage destroyed her joints. Morgana Scully walked around with a broken spine, refused testing, told it was “just anxiety.” Casandra Huntley in Nova Scotia has been living with an untreated cerebral spinal fluid leak for nearly a year, forced to lie horizontally to prevent excruciating pain, because doctors “don’t actually want to believe in a patient.”

“I was gaslighting myself at times. Like maybe I’m just crazy,” says Jocelyn Ivanauskas, who endured three years of jaw pain and immobility before finally getting diagnosed. When she and her boyfriend finally received answers, they “just started bawling” because she finally felt heard.

This is what medical gaslighting does: it makes patients doubt their own reality. It forces them to become amateur researchers, learning medical terminology just to sound credible enough to access basic care. It teaches them to avoid hospitals until symptoms become life-threatening. As one Black woman shared in groundbreaking Canadian research, “It was like learning a new language, right, in order to kind of explain to someone how you’re feeling.”

The systemic nature runs deep. Studies show that medical gaslighting stems from the privileging of biomedical knowledge over patients’ embodied experiences. When symptoms don’t fit textbook patterns, when pain doesn’t align with test results, patients are dismissed rather than believed. Women’s concerns are reduced to hormones. Black women’s pain is minimized or ignored entirely. Indigenous patients face compounded discrimination.

Yet within this crisis burns extraordinary resilience. Patients are refusing to stay silent. Davidson became an advocate for chronic illness. Scully is pursuing medicine to change the system from within. Julie Elliott warns that doctors “can gaslight someone to death” and demands accountability. The 1,500 voices in the HEAL Lab study transformed their trauma into testimony, creating an undeniable record that demands change.

The solution is both simple and radical: listen.

As UWindsor researcher Marissa Rakus discovered, “Patients don’t need an answer immediately, they want to be listened to, to be heard, validated, and to know they have someone to go on that journey of uncertainty with them.” Listen with curiosity. Listen with compassion. Listen without judgment. Acknowledge that patients are experts in their own bodies. Confront the implicit biases embedded in medical training. Create space for lived experience alongside clinical evidence.

“We shouldn’t have to be putting on the boxing gloves before we go to our doctor’s appointment,” says Angela Broughton, who has experienced medical gaslighting across three Canadian territories.

She’s right. Healthcare should be a sanctuary, not a battleground. When medicine stops listening, patients suffer, diseases progress, and lives are lost. When medicine chooses to hear, healing becomes possible.

The voices are rising. The evidence is mounting. The question now is: Will medicine finally listen?

Thanks for tuning in!

By Kiah Nirmal (she/her/hers) | Blog Committee Member

Sources

1. Global News article (Canadians share medical gaslighting experiences):
Meilleur, D. (2025, January 25). Canadians from across the country share their medical gaslighting experiences. Global News. https://globalnews.ca/news/10976471/canadians-share-medical-gaslighting-experience/

2. Arthritis Research Canada page (Feeling Dismissed by Your Doctor? It May Be Medical Gaslighting):
Arthritis Research Canada. (2026). Feeling dismissed by your doctor? It may be medical gaslighting. Arthritis Research Canada. https://www.arthritisresearch.ca/medical-gaslighting/

Note: If a specific author were listed on the Arthritis Research Canada page, you would replace “Arthritis Research Canada” with the author’s name. I couldn’t find an individual author name.

3. University of Windsor news (Medical gaslighting study):
Elliott, S. (2025, June 25). UWindsor medical gaslighting study brings patients’ painful truths to light. University of Windsor. https://www.uwindsor.ca/news/2025-06-25/uwindsor-medical-gaslighting-study-brings-patients%E2%80%99-painful-truths-light