You are reading Ask The Patient by Dr. Zed Zha, a doctor’s love letter that gives patients their voices back. If you enjoy it, please comment, like, share, or subscribe!
Thank you, everyone, for tuning in to our live video about medical gaslighting and medical trauma with
, an inspiring voice for humanism in medicine and someone who clearly has a more put-together office setup than I do!In this video, we discuss trauma caused by medicine, how it shows up in each of our practices, how patient blaming morphs into medical gaslighting, and what we believe is possible when more and more physicians, clinicians, and people within healthcare join our radical patient-centeredness revolution.✊
💬 Join the conversation in the comments!
Here are a couple of key points.
Medical Trauma
In my opinion, there are 2 layers of medical trauma:
Medicine can re-traumatize: the inadequate and insensitive care, which results from the widespread absence of trauma-informed care, retraumatizes survivors of all kinds, forcing people to navigate a system that neither believes nor understands them à this is how medicine makes trauma worse.
Medicine can be the trauma: invasive, dehumanizing, and dismissive medical practices violate bodily autonomy, undermine trust-based consent, and are the source of physical and emotional harm. This is when medicine itself becomes the trauma.
The result? In the short term, medical trauma shatters a person’s sense of safety and trust in medicine. And in the long term, it erodes self-worth and the ability to give trust to others or even oneself beyond medicine.
And we believe that without trust, there is no proper consent.
Patient Blaming
Patient blaming is the harmful and unjust practice of holding patients responsible for their health struggles, chronic conditions, complications, or even treatment failures. At its core, patient blaming says, “You made yourself sick.”
We don’t ask: What happened?
Instead, we ask: What did you do?
Here is the biggest problem I have with the patient blaming culture in medicine: it erases the broader social, economic, and environmental forces that shape health. And it perpetuates systemic violence such as racism, ableism, misogyny, weight bias, anti-LGBTQ+ bias, historic and ongoing oppression, and more, all under the guise of “personal responsibility.”
Medical Gaslighting
Medical gaslighting goes a step further than patient blaming. It happens when we blame patients often enough and for long enough that we make them believe they deserve to be sick. It systematically invalidates a patient’s reality until they question their own experiences.
A patient who was gaslighted into thinking their pain was all in their head might offer the confession, “I have very low pain tolerance,” before I even say anything, whilst in reality, procedures hurt, and we don’t always properly numb people.
Or, a gaslit patient might say, “I know this is because I am overweight,” but in truth, ill-health happens to bodies of all sizes. In fact, besides the invented notion of “ob*sity” itself, no one illness is unique to fat people. The patient has been blamed for so long by so many that they have now bought into the narrative themselves.
In other words, medical gaslighting goes beyond dismissal and invalidation. It turns the “done to” into the “doer,” and the blamed into the blamer.
What’s possible?
In my upcoming book, Consented: A Doctor's Call to End Medical Violence and Reclaim Patient Autonomy, I call out common ways we do harm and violate patient autonomy. And I devote an entire chapter to the topic of patient blaming/medical gaslighting, and another to how we trivialize trauma in medicine.
But at the end of each chapter, I also imagine a brighter future in a short speculative fiction.
In the patient blaming chapter, I imagine us rejecting a system that teaches us to label before it rewards us to learn. And in the medical trauma chapter, I imagine us always assuming trauma has entered the exam room before we do, and us refusing to be the reason why it will leave the room stronger.
What’s truly possible is a trauma-informed and bodily autonomy-prioritizing system where safety needs no advocacy and trust is at the center of every medical consent.
PS: Consented meets readers in April 2026, published by North Atlantic Books. I’d love to have you in the community. Subscribe to stay connected.
