Preface: I'm a hetero white male physician. I care for an underserved 99.9+% non-white population that has an incredibly robust history of trauma due to while m

Preface: I'm a hetero white male physician. I care for an underserved 99.9+% non-white population that has an incredibly robust history of trauma due to while males (I live and work on the Navajo Native American reservation, USA). That said, I was really expecting more content, but this article just seems like more "hetero while male bad" without many specifics cases, details, or statistics. The (only?) linked study[0], referring to women presenting with symptoms of heart disease (and referring to it as a "missed diagnosis" in the following sentence) used professional actors and actresses to portray symptoms (not looking at real patients with real symptoms or real outcomes). - If my interpretation of figure 1 is correct, heart disease was considered more frequently in women and mental health diagnoses considered more frequently in men. - According to table 3, for people 75 and older, heart disease was the final "most certain diagnosis" more frequently for women than men, and the mental health causes were exactly equal. If a diagnosis is being considered, but ultimately decided against, could that have anything to do with differing baseline rates[1]? Particularly if risk at a younger age were in part sex-dependent[2]? The study authors discuss this possibility (and even make a Bayes reference), and begin their concluding paragraph with "In summary, our results support the hypothesis that gender alone is not sufficient to produce bias in the diagnosis of patients with CHD symptoms." That part didn't make the article. (Also, I'm not sure that I agree with the authors statement that the difference in risk is independent of age -- CDC data[4] shows both sexes relatively sky-rocketing at about 80). Now I'm not saying that "medical gaslighting" is not a thing, but AFAICT "gaslighting" almost always implies bad intentions (I don't have access to the full text of the BMJ article discussing the term[3]). I'm quite sure that there are some physicians with bad intentions, but I think that's the exception. Based on my experience in the field, I would guess there are many more of us who misdiagnose due to being lazy, tired, stupid, or apathetic -- but I still think that's different than gaslighting. * What I am saying is that this article does a poor job making the case and tries to misrepresent its referenced study. * I would speculate that even more common is physicians that are bad at admitting "I don't know" or "that's out of my scope of training" -- for example, I'm an emergency physician, so I know relatively little about most medical conditions that generally won't kill or permanently disable you if not acted on immediately. For better or worse, I readily confess "I don't knows," usually phrased as "you deserve the expertise of a doctor that knows more about X." [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2825679/pdf/jwh.2008.1007.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2825679/pdf/jwh... [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/pdfs/mm7115a4-H.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/pdfs/mm7115a4-H.pdf [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7046a8-H.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7046a8-H.pdf [3]: https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o1974.full https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o1974.full [4]: https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D157/D357F285 https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D157/D357F285