19 Years of Medical Gaslighting: Why She Says Patients Have More Power Than Ever | Ilana Jacqueline

I first want to just know, because you have this tremendous book, what does it mean to be gaslit? And how does that apply to the first 19 years of your life?

Yeah, I think that's a that's a great question, a good place to start.

So to be gaslit in general is to have your reality repossessed and replaced with somebody else's.

And for medical gaslighting, it's a little more specific.

It's when a health care provider ignores or dismisses your concerns while blaming your symptoms on like stress or like ambiguous mental illness.

So I have a one and a half year old.

Last year, we were in the hospital three or four times, multiple days on end.

I just remember this one experience with a nurse actually saying, who's the nurse here? Because we had asked her a question that that apparently, you know, was pushing back against what she was recommending.

But yeah, this is I love this topic.

Can't wait to dive even deeper into it.

As far as you experience that, it's not the first I've heard, but it sucks every time.

I mean, honestly, since I've heard about this book and I've mentioned it to many people, I was just on vacation with my sister and immediately she just started reading it.

Everyone... can relate.

I know that you specifically wrote this book for women, which was obviously very important, but myself included reading, reading the book right now, there is a lot of resonance, you know, David's talking about his own, his own experience.

One of the reasons that I wanted to write the book was because you know what the feeling is of being gaslit.

Like anyone can have that experience and feel like injured emotionally.

But it can be hard to like wrap your head around what exactly happened here just now.

What is it that just made me so like scared and violated and felt so unfair? And so I really wanted to do some research on what does medical gaslighting mean? look like? What does it sound like? And why does it happen? And that's what the early chapters of the book are really about.

We hear medical gaslighting in the phrases like, you're too young to be sick, or you're too pretty to be sick, or all your test results are normal, so you must be fine.

And really what's happening is we have doctors that are overburdened in the system right now.

It used to be 20 minutes that they got to sit down with you and then it's 10 and we're getting closer to five here and you're not even able to go to a doctor that knows you.

You have to go to like an urgent care to get care because there's such a shortage of doctors.

But that is one of the reasons why we come up against that pushback is because these doctors don't know us and they don't have that experience with us.

And we all know

that.