A discussion of medical gaslighting: What it is, what patients can do to prevent or to respond to it, and what many people get very wrong about it.
0:12 My qualifications to discuss this topic
1:40 5 signs of medical gaslighting
11:13 Why I say that medical gaslighting is "sort of" very real
14:40 How patients can prevent gaslighting from happening
17:02 How patients should respond to gaslighting once it's happened
After watching the video myself, I discovered a few likely questions/comments that I can preemptively address:
1. Although mentioned early in the video, I want to emphasize that the advice I’m giving here is based on how the healthcare system actually works, not how it should work.
2. In reference to the two cases I’ve observed in which a medical professional deliberately lied to their patient, yes I discussed the situation directly with the patients and their families, and I referred the incident up the respective chains of command. (Neither incident involved a coworker at my current institution.)
3. If this is the video for laypersons on medical gaslighting, why isn’t there one directed towards medical professionals on how to better communicate with patients in the first place? One of the other courses I teach at our medical school covers these communication skills, including active listening skills, display of empathy, challenging bedside situations, and how to deliver bad news. It requires a combination of small group discussions, role play, and a lot of simulation using professional actors. It is not a set of skills that can be effectively taught via remote, asynchronous video (i.e. KZfaq).
4. I should have discussed the impact from the generalized loss of empathy that healthcare workers - particularly hospital-based healthcare workers - have experienced due to the COVID pandemic. This issue is discussed in detail in a separate video from last year: • COVID, Burnout, and th...
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May 2024 Update: After months of internal deliberation, I have decided to disable comments to this video. I had hoped that comments here would allow patients to share their experiences, and to share advice to both patients and healthcare professionals alike. While there have been helpful and productive comments like that, the vast majority of them can only be classified as "doctor-bashing", often laced with profanity and occasionally including intimate and extremely thorough details of a viewer's medical history. Viewers who have had positive experiences with their doctors don't tend to watch or leave comments on a video about medical gaslighting. So overall, by highlighting only the most negative of experiences, the comments were reinforcing a dramatically exaggerated negative impression of the healthcare profession, which does everyone a disservice, patients included.