Imagine a scenario where you have Diabetes Mellitus. A serious life threatening condition if untreated. You were diagnosed by the only specialist in your state who has since retired. There are only a few specialists in the entire country in which millions of people suffer from the disease.
You go to your doctor to seek treatment. The doctor blames your symptoms on your broken leg. You do not have a broken leg and you have never broken your leg. Also a broken leg has nothing to do with your disease.
Confused you go to another doctor, maybe even a specialist. A specialist who is adjacent to your disease and should be treating patients like you, but they refuse to believe you and everyone with your disease , are really sick. This specialist also says all your symptoms are due to your broken leg. You are not offered any treatments for your broken leg, which remember is not actually broken. You are not given treatments for your diabetes either.
Now imagine this scenario playing out for decades. Somehow through a miracle you are still alive. Every time you seek treatment you are told it is the fault of your broken leg. You spend countless hours educating your health care provider and including sharing peer reviewed studies dating back decades that state that diabetes is in fact a real disease of organic(physical) nature.
This is exactly what happens to ME, LC, POTS, fibromyalgia, Sjogrens, and many other female-dominated "invisible" (tell that to my lab results and vitals)chronic illnesses. Only in this scenario your symptoms/disease are blamed on anxiety which in this scenario you do not have .Some patients may have co morbid anxiety just like some diabetics at times can break bones ,but that is still not the cause of the disease. Nor is it a valid reason to not treat the patient.
If you are thinking "yeah but untreated diabetes can lead to death". This is true. It is also true for untreated ME, POTS etc.
This is why having an anxiety label (when we do not have anxiety) angers and frustrates us. It is not that we don't believe anxiety is serious and worthy or treatments empathy etc-we just don't have it and are tired f it being used as an excuse not to treat us.
It also does an injustice to people who do suffer from anxiety. It trivializes their struggles and further stigmatizes mental health/psychiatric illnesses even further.
Healthcare workers need to stop weaponizing psychology , especially to their female patients simply because they are too ignorant to figure out what is actually going on. We really need to bring back "idiopathic"(meaning "idiot doctor"/unknown cause) instead of psychologizing physical illnesses .
This needs to stop.
Men do also face medical gaslighting and dismissal but it is a lot more common in women especially women with auto immune, neurological or "invisible "illnesses. These illnesses are more common in women.
