July 15, 2025 – At 15, Jakki Maser was told she had the spine of a 40-year-old.
"The orthopedic surgeon kept saying, 'You had to have been in a car accident,' " she recalled.
When Jakki insisted otherwise, the doctor didn't respond with curiosity. Instead, he gave her crushing advice: Don't run. Don't jump. Don't lift anything over 10 pounds.
But Jakki was a high school athlete. She couldn't imagine surrendering the sports she loved.
It felt equally wrong to accept the surgeon's diagnosis of degenerative disk disease.
"I talked to so many people who had that," she said. "And nobody experienced what I experienced – these horrible flare-ups where I just couldn't move."
The first time it happened, at age 13, Jakki was walking home from school after a basketball game. "Everything just seized up," she said. "It was electric, shooting through my body."
She was stuck on the couch for two weeks. "I couldn't roll over. Everything hurt – even just talking or laughing."
Eventually, the pain eased enough for her to play softball. Inevitably, though, another flare-up would send her to bed – and to yet another doctor, in the hope that someone would offer answers.
Some doctors listened but admitted they didn't know how to help. But the overwhelming response was to not take her pain seriously. You're young – you'll bounce back. You look fine now, so it must not be that bad. Have you tried stretching?
During those early years, Jakki wasn't prescribed a single medication. It took two years to convince a doctor to even scan her back. When that MRI didn't yield answers, Jakki began a frustrating, decades-long journey that often left her doubting her own body.
"I started to question, 'Do I just have a really low pain tolerance? Does my body just overreact?' " she said. "I didn't think it was all in my head, but I did question if something was wrong with my body – if something was wrong with me."
The problem wasn't with Jakki. It was with the system that was supposed to support her.
What Is Medical Gaslighting?
As a young woman in pain, Jakki was a prime candidate for medical gaslighting – the denial, dismissal, and minimization of medical problems that makes patients doubt their experiences.
As with many health issues that mostly affect women, it's hard to know just how common the problem is. But it's one that many like Jakki are refusing to accept.
"Culturally, we're becoming more aware of it," said Maria Rovito, PhD, a medical gaslighting expert at the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Albany, New York. "People are understanding that they can say no in doctors' offices – that they do have that power."
Beyond the medical sphere, "gaslighting" has become cultural shorthand for the sort of confusing behavior that makes a person's head spin. It's a popular term because it gives language to what some have gone through but struggle to explain.
Especially if persistent, gaslighting messes with a person – and, often, that's the point.
"The perpetrator leaves the person questioning their lived reality," said Alexandra Fuss, PhD, a Harvard Medical School psychologist who studies medical gaslighting. "That person ends up having more power," since they're the one defining what's real.
For patients who feel dismissed or disbelieved, "medical gaslighting" has become a term of empowerment – a way of insisting that, No, doctors don't know my body better than I do.
"In our society, we view physicians as ultimate authority figures – anything they say is the bottom line," Rovito said.
With this power differential, providers may tend to minimize symptoms, imply a patient is being overdramatic, or deny experiences that don't match test results.
But women like Jakki are upending these dynamics, insisting they deserve to be treated as experts on their own bodies. They're refusing to be pushed to the sidelines of their care or dismissed as unreliable witnesses to their own symptoms.
And, no, they're not just being dramatic.
Research consistently shows that women have different health care experiences than men.
A study in the journal Pain found that women are perceived to have less pain and be more prone to exaggeration than men. Another study showed that women are given fewer pain medications – but more antidepressants and mental health referrals – than men.
In a Swedish study, doctors were asked to diagnose low-back pain affecting a patient's mood, sleep, and ability to work. They were more than twice as likely to label women's pain as medically unexplained, even though the men were described identically.
Women are "seen as overly emotional about their health," Fuss said.
This is especially true when the symptom is pain. For these women, a vicious cycle can occur: Woman describes her pain. Provider calls it psychological. Woman feels dismissed and acts distressed. Provider takes her even less seriously.
"We have to appear calm and collected," Rovito said, "because if we fall apart in front of physicians, they think we're being dramatic or too emotional."
The Illnesses You Have to Fight to Get
Medical gaslighting doesn't just dismiss pain – it undermines a wide spectrum of conditions, often those that disproportionately affect women, like lupus, endometriosis, fibromyalgia, and migraine. Contested diseases like Lyme or long COVID can also stick patients with a "legitimacy deficit," forcing them to prove they're sick.
For women, this can range from tired stereotypes to shocking negligence. Doctors might brush off period pain as "normal," blame hard-to-diagnose complaints on depression, or suggest yoga when an MRI is needed.
"When one physical therapist said to do the cat-cow stretch, I told them 'cow' was painful," Jakki recalls. "They were like, 'No, this is very good for you.' "
In many cases, gender bias collides with opioid caution, driving providers to withhold pain medication when it's needed.
Since some providers underestimate the pain that putting in an intrauterine device, or IUD, women may be expected to endure it without intervention – a 2025 review found that only about 5% of patients receive pain or anxiety medication on the day of the procedure. Only recently has the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists formally recommended numbing when an IUD is put in.
The Retrievals podcast revealed another disturbing example: Dozens of women at Yale's fertility center who complained of excruciating pain during egg retrievals were ignored or dismissed. Only later was it discovered that a nurse was using saline solution instead of fentanyl.
"Many of the women blamed themselves or thought this is just what women go through," the podcast's host told PBS.
The tendency to dismiss women can lead to diagnostic delays of months or even years.
As a 2018 study found, endometriosis often takes repeated medical visits and years of intense pain before women are diagnosed, with symptoms frequently minimized as "normal" or "not that bad."
Similarly, in a 2022 study, a third of patients with long COVID reported lengthy diagnostic journeys. Many were told they had a mental health condition. One woman was given a litany of alternate explanations, ranging from depression to "women's troubles."
That vague term – "women's troubles" – has no medical meaning. But it does hint at the disturbing origins of modern-day medical gaslighting.
How Medical Gaslighting Got Started
Medical gaslighting is partly the legacy of hysteria, a historical catch-all for women's health complaints. Think of it as the 19th-century version of, "Are you sure it's not your period?"
"Calling so many things hysteria led to a lot of missed diagnoses and downplaying of women's symptoms," Fuss said.
It also drove the medical community to exclude women from studies – not until 1993 was clinical research required to include female subjects. With male physiology long seen as the norm, a lack of understanding about women's bodies still lingers.
"We know from studies that women feel pain more intensely," Fuss said. "But if we're leaning on studies that primarily looked at men, providers might assume women are exaggerating or that what they say isn't possible."
With this research gap, health care providers may lack specific knowledge of women's health. And if they're overworked, they may not be willing to investigate tricky cases. Some might not stay up to date on the literature, relying on what they learned decades earlier, often with a male-centric perspective.
The result may be what some call "polite gaslighting." Fuss has coined her own term: "medical invalidation," which she defines as gaslighting without malicious intent.
Some providers may believe they're acting in the patient's best interest while inadvertently making the patient feel dismissed. "Even so, the end result is the same," Fuss said. "The patient feels destabilized and doubts their ability to make judgments."
Early on, Jakki mostly went through this kind of "polite" gaslighting.
"I was told, 'You're young. You'll bounce back,' " she said. "Some insisted it was muscular – that I must have had an athletic injury. One doctor laughed at me, saying I probably just didn't remember getting hurt." Another shut down the conversation, saying, "Listen, you're welcome to get a second opinion."
And Jakki did exactly that – over the years, she saw 14 doctors. Six physical therapists. Two athletic trainers. A handful of chiropractors. An acupuncturist. But each flare-up yielded only another failed attempt at finding answers.
Along the way, Jakki lost a lot.
First it was high school sports, then college sports. Eventually, her emotional health started to suffer. "There was a lot of angry crying, wondering, 'Why won't they listen to me?' " she said. "It felt like nobody believed me or even cared. I developed this sense of, 'No one's going to save you but you.' I couldn't trust anyone to help me."
What began as polite dismissal became flat-out denial as Jakki aged. "I was told, 'There's nothing in these images that would cause the pain you describe.' And there was never follow-up – 'Show me where it hurts,' or 'Let me check this.' "
As a young mom, Jakki learned to adapt. Her pain worsened with each birth, despite doctors' insistence that pregnancy wouldn't change anything. She stopped carrying car seats and placed a pillow under her knees to hold her babies with less pain. She got used to letting her young kids open doors for her.
"My 2-year-old daughter would wake me up and say, 'Good morning, Mommy. Does your back hurt?' " she said. "Helping Mom had become my kids' norm, but I didn't want that to stay their norm."
Then, in late 2023, when Jakki was 35, the pain abruptly changed. She calls it "the incident."
Pain shot like a jolt of electricity down both legs. Her lower body started to feel cold before going totally numb. First, Jakki was terrified. Then, after another flare-up forced her to cancel plans with her son, she got angry.
"I told my husband, 'This is ruining my life. I can't do anything,' " she said.
This time, the first place Jakki turned wasn't the doctor's office. It was a Facebook group.
The Cost of Medical Gaslighting
Medical gaslighting doesn't only sever the patient's relationship with a provider. Over time, it can lead women to mistrust – or even reject – the entire health care system.
In the study of women with endometriosis, many who felt unsupported by providers turned to online groups for advice. Often, they became self-taught endometriosis experts.
Jakki adopted a similar mindset.
She enrolled in continuous education courses to learn how to spot spinal conditions in radiology scans. At her therapist's urging, she started to advocate for herself more. When a CT scan report didn't mention her bones, Jakki requested a second review.
What the radiologist added to that report changed her life.
"When I read 'pseudoarticulations,' I was like, Yep, got it. I know what that is,' " Jakki said.
Instantly, she recognized the bony projections as a hallmark of Bertolotti's syndrome. With this rare spinal condition, part of the lowest vertebra is enlarged and connects abnormally to the sacrum, sometimes forming false joints that can create mechanical stress.
Jakki began devouring everything she could find online, including an article about a 15-year-old girl with the condition. She felt like she was reading her own story.
Her next step was joining a Facebook group for Bertolotti's syndrome. Ironically, it was there that Jakki learned about Colin Haines, MD, a spine surgeon in Virginia who treated the syndrome. His patients praised his listening skills as much as his surgical abilities. Jakki scheduled a telehealth visit.
Right away, she knew he wasn't like the other doctors.
"I'd been told if I wanted a surgeon to help me, I couldn't use medical words. That would irritate them," she said. Her experience had proven that true: "When I told one doctor what I read and asked, 'Is that possible?' he said, 'Stay off Dr. Google,' then left."
Jakki had learned to hold back in appointments, afraid of alienating the doctors. But with Haines, she could just be herself.
"When I told him about the research I'd done, he got really excited," she said. "He wasn't threatened by it – he appreciated it. We could talk in depth and actually problem-solve together. I felt so humanized."
Jakki had found an actual partner.
"I like to think of myself as a person first and a doctor next," Haines said. "One of the best things I can do is close my mouth and let the patient describe their life."
As it turned out, Jakki was right. She did have Bertolotti's syndrome. Years of bone-on-bone grinding had also damaged the disk above her Bertolotti's joint, constricting nearby nerves.
Unfortunately, after 20 years of friction, the fix wasn't simple. "If we'd caught the Bertolotti's sooner, we probably wouldn't have had to do such an extensive surgery," Haines said.
At first, Jakki had two procedures: a fusion of her Bertolotti's joint and a disk replacement. Two days later, another procedure helped ease the pressure on her nerves.
"Afterward, I had no numbness anymore – it was all gone," she said.
Beyond the physical relief was also emotional healing. During Jakki's hospital stay, Haines checked on her daily, calling if he couldn't visit in person. When codeine triggered a two-day migraine, he acted swiftly, urging her not to wait so long to alert him next time.
Today, Jakki can pick up her kids – even her older ones, who are ages 6 and 8. She can carry groceries in from the car. She can play baseball with her son.
After her surgery, Jakki sent Haines a video of her carrying a laundry basket upstairs as her kids cheered. Haines was thrilled. "Partnering with patients makes my job more fun and fulfilling," he said. "If I didn't know what a big deal that was for Jakki, I would have missed that personal joy. It was such a win."
Jakki knows this joy, too. As a mental health counselor, she helps nursing programs train future health care providers, offering her a way to support the system that didn't support her.
"I needed someone who could say, 'I don't know what's going on, but I'm here to figure this out with you,' " she said. "I want to be a person who can do that and teach that to others."