Clinician Scepticism

The study distinguishes legitimate clinical doubt from medical gaslighting, which participants defined as deliberate manipulative invalidation. Participants accepted that some clinician doubt can be legitimate and necessary for evidence-based medicine. The authority gap between patients and clinicians made clinician doubt especially corrosive to patient self-belief. Repeated clinician disbelief led patients to absorb that disbelief as their own. Participants overwhelmingly identified clinician scepticism as the origin of their self-doubt. Neurologists were most often described as dismissive, followed by cardiologists.