When Tests Are Normal, but Symptoms Aren’t...
I've been seeing so much frustration out there lately on how gaslit patients feel when the medical system doesn't reflect what they're feeling. Often, people feel that seeing a psychiatrist means "giving up" or that their medical team doesn't believe them. I want to try to hold space for that frustration here.
There are few experiences in medicine more demoralizing than being told your tests are normal when your body is clearly not. You don’t feel “normal.” You don’t function normally. You don’t live normally. And yet the labs, the scans, the scopes, and the reports keep coming back stamped with reassuring language that feels anything but reassuring.
For many people with chronic gut symptoms—abdominal pain, nausea, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, early fullness, reflux, or unpredictable bowel habits—this mismatch becomes its own kind of trauma. The suffering is real, persistent, and disruptive, but the evidence people expect to validate it never shows up where they’ve been told it should.
This disconnect is not rare. It is not imagined. And it is not a personal failure.