Study: Women With Autoimmune Disease Face More Misdiagnoses
The Facts
- Research led by the University of Cambridge and the University of East Anglia, published Tuesday in The Lancet's eClinicalMedicine, found female patients with autoimmune diseases were about 74% more likely than males to report psychosomatic misdiagnoses.
- The survey of 6,607 people with autoimmune conditions, most of them female and based in the U.K., found that 43% of women said their symptoms had been attributed to a psychiatric cause, compared with 33% of men. Misdiagnosis as psychosomatic was reported by 34% of women and 22% of men.
- After adjusting for age, disease group, continent and household finances, females had higher odds than males of reporting a psychiatric misdiagnosis, at about 46% greater, and a psychosomatic misdiagnosis, at about 74% greater, researchers reported.
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The Spin
Industry-critical narrative
Being told it's all in the head while an immune system quietly wrecks the body is a failure of medicine, not a quirk of hard-to-spot disease. Autoimmune conditions aren't trickier in women, so the gap in how quickly symptoms are believed points straight to bias. Honest workups and plain belief should be the baseline, not something earned after years of doubt.
Pro-industry narrative
Relying on a single, self-selected, memory-based online survey to claim widespread gaslighting stretches the evidence. Hormonal shifts, earlier anxiety diagnoses and symptoms that mimic everyday fatigue explain plenty without assuming doctors dismiss women. Men get overlooked too, so diagnostic difficulty looks like the real culprit rather than bias.
