I was told was told my stomach ulcer was psychological, how about you?

[Kay00]

In response to this article in the guardian, what conditions have you been told by a doctor or medical professional with psychosomatic or psychological?

For fun-ish 🙃

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/oct/13/women-autoimmune-conditions-psychological-misdiagnosis-cambridge-study

My mother, in her 90s, had a fall and was in agony. Eventually taken by ambulance to hospital. Suspected neck of femur fracture, examined by a consultant, but X-ray showed nothing. She stayed in hospital but was still in agony with her leg at an odd angle. After 4 days the finally did an X-ray further down her leg. It was a horrible fracture half way down her femur. They just hadn’t believed an elderly woman’s pain. We did get a formal apology.

I was absolutely exhausted having really bad bouts of breathlessness, major headspins on standing up. Young male training doctor at my gp told me it was probably anxiety, I told him I've never sufferer with anxiety and still dont and he gave me this tilted head side eye. Then bloods came back and showed severe iron deficient anaemia, deficient folate and b12. Wee dick.

I have a blocked tear duct which means I cry all the time, after ten years of this I am finally getting some help.

The several hundred blood clots in my leg were probably a pulled muscle.

The siezures I was having due to an undiagnosed brain haemorrhage was probably the aftermath of a cold,

Same. My dad paid for me to go private at 46 and bingo, hello endo.
A lot of GP’s told me to have a baby to sort out the pain. Brilliant. What a cure that would have been had I been able to have sex in the first place.

Or maybe the general public need to complain rather than to worship the behemoth.

No psychological, but I was told my (diagnosed, imaged, and surgery scheduled for) twisted ovarian cyst was probably just back pain by a male doctor.

My “dramatic, attention seeking” was actually gallstones. 7 NHS doctors missed it. It was found in 15 minutes with a private consultant.

I was told I couldn’t have been pregnant…whilst miscarrying. Took my breath away. In desperation, I’d secretly hoped for all sorts of scenarios - that maybe it was twins and one was surviving or that the large amount of blood I was losing might not be a miscarriage this time. Due to previous losses, I’d been testing a couple of times a week during pregnancy. The fucker couldn’t understand why I was upset as he’d been “kind” by calling me in rather than leaving me bleeding in the waiting room for another few hours. He managed to make an horrific time worse.

I eventually had children in case anyone is looking for hope after multiple miscarriages.

Lots of terrible experiences here. It’s just so bloody depressing.

My mum was told by her GP that her symptoms were stress and to listen to some mindfulness podcasts. Nope, she was in heart failure and had to have a pacemaker and defibrillator fitted after collapsing in the street. She very nearly died.

A few years later the same GP told her that her tremors, walking issues and neurological problems were anxiety. After a nasty fall and stitches in her head, the locum GP who saw her for a follow up was sufficiently concerned to refer her for tests. She had Parkinson’s as we’d suspected. It took four years to get the diagnosis.

Ironically, my dad had some hand tremors around six months before mum’s initial appointment and was immediately referred for tests. His was a side effect of a medication he was taking.

I’m now very wary of the medical profession and would prefer to avoid them whenever possible.

Told I wasn’t in enough pain to be having an ectopic pregnancy but probably only had a miscarriage by a junior doctor . By the time they took me down to theatre for a d and c I was in agony. Yep it was a ruptured ectopic pregnancy.

I had a post partum haemorrhage 4 weeks after having my first baby. Lost huge amount of blood and massive clots. Blue lighted to hospital but not before passing out cold for minutes.

I heard the obs and gyn doctor whispering that it was my first period starting. Turned out to be retained placenta which was removed in theatre.

It’s actually a female doctor that dismissed me. I ended up in hospital very ill with what turned out to be a kidney infection, I also had signs of sepsis. Male doctor was hugely concerned and delivered excellent care. After a couple of days I was allowed home but had to return each day for IV anti biotics and a review. For the first two return visits I saw the same doctor who said my levels were still very high and I must stay on the anti biotics longer. Next day I saw a female doctor. She was so dismissive. I said I still felt very unwell, exhausted with pain in my sides. She told me I’d ’probably slept funny’ and that I ‘didn’t seem as bad as I was making out’. She told me the remaining anti biotics were overkill and basically made out like I was being a drama queen. I asked about a fit note for work and her response was ‘do you REALLY think you need time off work?’.
she discharged me with zero advice and guidance and the tablet anti biotics did work but it took much longer for me to recover and I basically felt like I’d made a big deal over nothing.

I was told that continued vaginil infections, bloating, constant need for urination and pain were something, 'I just needed to learn to live with'.

It was Ovarian Cancer (and extreme endometriosis and adenomyosis - which had been passed off as 'normal period pain' for 35 years).

The knee pain that I have experienced from the age of 13 on was first growing pains, then in my head, then heavily hinted I was making it up for attention. Nope I have a genetic defect that causes my bones to randomly grow for no reason which cause arthritis. It took from 13 to 30 to get a its probably this diagnosis and even though its in my notes a lot of doctors stil dont beleive it. I now have arthritisis in both knees and both shoulders. No help is given though I have learnt to deal with on my own. I am now 50 and am now told any pain is age related and I just have to cope.

Told for years my exhaustion and sleeping twenty hours a day was in my head, that my thyroid levels were 'normal', despite the thyroid being removed.

A friend was threatened with a social service referral for the modern name for Munchausens by proxy. He had a brain tumour. Exactly where she said it was. The symptoms were classic. No apologies.

Then she had two years post diagnosis of them refusing to believe he was in pain - despite suicide attempts with notes - because he was autistic so probably imagining it. He is finally getting more treatment now because she took another friend who is a doctor to an appointment.

It is inoperable, so she will be dealing with this forever. Incidentally, the peer led support groups are full of the same stories from single mums, and they are almost all single. Because dads tend to leave when the going gets tough (obvs not all men, but a great many). The few remaining dads get their kids diagnosed and treated quicker with less aggro.

I had anxiety as a child due to parenting issues. I am sure that diagnosis follows me around even though the anxiety went when I was a teenager. And they look at me through the prism of an anxiety diagnosis now before consultation.

Am I right you can ask to see your medical records?

I'll preface this by saying I've been diagnosed with depression from my teen years, and genuinely most physical symptoms I've ever had have been put down to that, and attention seeking because of it. My mother was one of the culprits too, she was a nurse. Just a few notable ones.

The appendix that burst and caused me to need to be in hospital for a week on intravenous antibiotics at 15 was attention seeking for period pain, overhead a dr say to my mum that I couldn't be faking the high temperature so 'something' was going on.

The infected and blocked gall bladder was only taken seriously when I was taken to a&e and a male paramedic noted I was 'yellow as a canary', previously dismissed by different GPs as anxiety, depression and attention seeking, one put it down to it being around bonfire night and I 'must not like fireworks'. Was in surgery a few hours later.

The back pain all my life and later hip pain, combined with numbness in my thigh in certain positions and a refusal of my hip to move in certain ways and severe pain during later pregnancy has been recently diagnosed as a malformed hip joint and misalignment that I've had since birth, I've always walked with a pigeon toed gait and my right leg (in the words of the spinal Dr I saw) 'looks like it's been put on wrong' . But apparently even that can be caused by depression and anxiety for years.

DD having huge tonsils and adenoids and a constantly running nose, a cough where it collected at the back of her throat and generally being unwell from pretty much birth was written off by health visitors as her being a 'winter baby' and my post natal depression (that I genuinely don't think I had but was assumed after a previous diagnosis) she also never slept because she couldn't breathe on her back, that apparently was my imagination too. She was 18 months old when I finally got a sleep study done, her O2 SATs were dropping very low during sleep because she couldn't breathe, she'd then gasp and wake up crying, thankfully! Was examined after that and surgery to remove them a month later.

And now my menopause symptoms are being dismissed as all in my head too, the dry skin I've never had before, the missing periods (that have never been missed except for during pregnancy no matter how depressed they decided I was) the headaches that last days. I'm 47, it's not outside the realms of possibility but I have a feeling that I'm probably just going to go through it without anything and might be believed when I'm about 60 🤷🏼‍♀️. I got given anti depressants last year for the symptoms.

It's like having had a diagnosis of depression, it explains every symptom for the rest of my life and makes me incapable of ever having physical illness, or even normal body process like menopause. Honestly I think that a lot of this so called 'depression' has been linked to the times I've had physical illness and pain and wasn't taken seriously until it was unrefutable with blood tests, or something like a high temperature or jaundice that I couldn't be accused of faking.

Sorry that happened to you. 💐

Your point about the exams was very interesting. I do think doctors are trained, consciously and subconsciously, to find reasons to dismiss patients. Exams are one, this idea of a sort of mind/body duality, where what you think and feel somehow is not organic, though obviously everything your body generates is organic, blood or bone or fear or speech - it's all just your body. There's no other part of you that isn't your body. So I think that idea impedes both doctor and patient in their quest to resolve the issue.

And then I suppose the hierarchical structure where patients are cast as supplicants and the doctor as benefactor, instead of as voluntary collaborators on a shared goal to uncover practical problems and take action together to resolve them. If doctors could get over themselves and bring their training and professional knowledge to the project, without all this psychodrama, probably a lot more conditions could be treated effectively.

It's a shame because it's such a waste of everyone's time. And the consequences are so unequally distributed.

I do think these sorts of problems are ones that AI will genuinely help us with. The disjoint between the actions taken and the results make it clear that anyone who could actually connect those things and derive insights at scale could really clean up.

After having my daughter the bleeding and tight, pulling pain was normal, and continued to be ‘normal’ as the weeks went on. And on.

I can’t remember how long it was before I was sent for a scan, but the radiographer was absolutely horrified, spoke to a consultant immediately, got me sent to hospital the same day. Then I sat in a waiting room for 8 hours as they prioritised the urgent cases first. I finally got seen and was told they didn’t really scan women just after they’d given birth so they didn’t really know what it should look like, so I was probably fine, go home and have a paracetamol.

I went through this cycle about 4 or 5 times during the 9 months it took to stop bleeding. At one point a doctor passed me in a corridor and said it looked like products of conception that had calcified. By the time I was seen, that doctor had ended her shift and I was told everything was normal again.

I ended up being prescribed antibiotics for something else (can’t remember what it was now) and towards the end of the course, a load of blood, green slime and weird gritty material came out, and from there the pain subsided and the bleeding stopped. It didn’t give me back the 9 months of PND, struggle to bond with my baby and having to give up trying to breastfeed that I’m pretty sure were all exacerbated by being in pain the whole time though.

The female GP, who at an HRT review, told me that I probably wouldn't need HRT if I didn't go to work. I was 54.

They got very hot under the collar when I said all women were entitled to optimal treatment to manage symptoms whether they worked or not and didn't like it when I suggested she give up work before the menopause.

TBF she did apologise but said her words were taken the wrong way. You would think someone in the top 5% could use the proper words really.

Adding to this depressing list of awful care with my own examples:

Inflammatory autoimmune arthritis - 8 years to diagnosis. Palmed off so many times with hormones, age, stress etc. Thanks be to goodness, I eventually had private health cover through work and got an MRI that light up like a bloody Christmas tree!

Anaemia - chronic ongoing for nearly a decade. Wasn't aware until I asked for a print off of my own blood test results. Often was below the ridiculously over wide range and still it wasn't flagged!!!! Was repeatedly told that my exhaustion was just how it was when you had two small children. FFS!

Hypothyroidism - had so many arguments with my GP about this. She was constantly trying to get me to take anti-depressants and I kept saying but I'm not depressed, I'm exhausted and listed off all my other physical symptoms. I remember at one point she told me I just needed to get more sunshine and aerobic exercise. I wept in her office, as I could barely walk for 10 minutes without feeling like all my batteries had been removed. In the end went privately and got the treatment I needed.

It took DS 12 years to get a diagnosis of a chronic bowel disease. He was palmed off with autism, anxiety, stress, autism and autism. Finally got the test we'd been asking for for years and he came up as having the most severe form of the bowel disease you could possibly have.

I have no faith in the NHS at all. I think it is not there to help people be well and it is most definitely not a partnership between you and your GP to work out a way to receive the best treatment - or whatever bullshit crap their PR department has come out with.

I had similar - was told it was constipation (it wasn’t)

My youngest son is celiac and kept having health problems when he was a child - lack of weight gain, vomiting every day and stomach issues. The GP kept telling me it was "growing pains" without listening to what I said. He thought I was a "difficult mom". I changed doctors.

The new doctor, a woman, listened to me and suspected celiac disease. One of the problems we faced was my son having a needle phobia making it almost impossible to get blood tests. She gave me a letter for the hospital, outlining how to deal with the needle phobia - emla patches and doctors explaining clearly to him that the patches would take away the needle pain. It went wihout a problem. The blood results without a biopsy (not done in children) showed he was celiac and without gluten in his diet, all his health problems disappeared.

As an anecdote he's in his 30s, still needle phobic and using emla patches for vaccines/blood work.

Some doctors are truly awful. Specially the ones with a God Complex believing they know all the answers without really listening what their patients are telling them.