Thank you to the brilliantly talented ⁠Deb Talan⁠, formerly of The Weepies, for inspiring today's episode.

Today we're diving into medical gaslighting - what fun! We also talk about some of the ways we've worked to fight back against it, advocate for ourselves as patients, and express gratitude for the good providers out there.

DOES NOT BEAR REPEATING

This is not the way I thought it would be
Thought it would be much lighter
This is not the way I thought it would be
Thought it would be much brighter
...
I thought it was once but it was again and again and again
-The Weepies

I took a comparative health care class in college. We started in the U.S. and then visited Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. It was 1993. The class was designed to compare medical care in “developed” countries (in this case, United States and Austria) to that in “under-developed” countries (which in 1993 happened to be Hungary and the Czech Republic). And yes, “developed” and “under-developed” are indeed the terms that were used at the time.

I understood the assignment. Like the good Stepford Student that I was, my final paper indicated so: “developed” health care = GOOD, “under-developed” health care = BAD. I took my “earned” A, the memories from my curated hospital tours and carefully selected (and as carefully not selected) set of assigned readings, and carried on with my life, secure in the knowledge that I lived in a nation with the best health care system in the world.

Years later, I got sick. And everything changed.

Continues at ⁠https://amyblackstonephd.substack.com/p/chapter-3-does-not-bear-repeating⁠

We reference the definition of medical gaslighting used in this article: ⁠https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(24)00396-6/fulltext⁠