Medical gaslighting: to say that invoking psychological symptoms is equivalent to dismissal is reductionist

The news article on medical gaslighting raises the important point that doctors should always accept patient concerns about symptoms and never dismiss them as imaginary.1 But it also risks making the error of conflating considering a role for psychological factors in the aetiology of symptoms with dismissing them, and the ordering of biomedical investigation as a key indicator of acceptance.The consequences of this line of argument are potential iatrogenic harms from denying patients a full understanding of their illness and the potential benefit of psychological treatments, as well as increasing the risk of adverse consequences of unnecessary biomedical investigation. To say that invoking psychological factors is equivalent to dismissal is to retreat into a narrow biomedical reductionism that many of us hoped we had escaped long ago.
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