There is a particular kind of medical gaslighting that happens when test results come back normal and the symptoms do not stop.
Sonya Belin experienced this for months. Shortness of breath. Heart racing. A sense of panic she could not explain and had never felt before. She went to the emergency department. Multiple times. The tests came back normal. She was told, in various ways, that what she was experiencing was not what she thought it was.
She knew something was wrong. She was right.
The Pattern
“Tearfully, I told the ER physician at the last visit that I understood the tests were coming back normal,” Sonya recalls, “but something wasn’t right. I shouldn’t be short of breath, heart racing, and panicking. This wasn’t my normal.”
This is a pattern documented in the literature and in the lives of countless women: symptoms that are real and disabling, tests that do not capture them, and providers who substitute the test result for the patient’s account of her own experience. Women’s pain and distress are more often attributed to anxiety or psychosomatic causes than men’s equivalent presentations. The studies on this are not ambiguous.
Sonya, who is Black, was navigating this in a clinical environment where the race-specific dimensions of being dismissed, undertreated, and disbelieved compound the gender-specific ones.
What Was Actually Wrong
When Sonya was ultimately diagnosed — iron deficiency with significant anemia — the treatment was straightforward. The symptoms resolved. The months of being told she was essentially fine had a measurable cost: in health, in work, in the grinding emotional labor of repeatedly asserting that her experience was real.
Iron deficiency anemia is common in women of reproductive age, particularly Black women, due to a combination of dietary patterns, menstrual blood loss, and access to care factors that the health system has not addressed with the urgency the prevalence deserves.
What Her Story Demands
Sonya’s experience is not an unusual case. It is a template.
The template goes like this: a woman presents with symptoms. Tests do not reveal an obvious cause. The woman is told she is fine, or told to reduce stress, or offered a psychiatric referral. She continues to know she is not fine. She eventually gets a correct diagnosis after further advocacy. The time between presentation and diagnosis represents preventable suffering.
Disrupting this pattern requires changing what happens in those initial encounters. It requires providers who are trained to weight patient testimony alongside test results. It requires diagnostic protocols that include the conditions most common in women. It requires a clinical culture that defaults to belief, not skepticism, when women say something is wrong.
Sonya Belin shared her experience with the Society for Women’s Health Research as part of their Women’s Health Perspectives series.