OBJECTIVES: This Discussion paper seeks to raise awareness of the phenomena of dismissive medicine (DM) and medical gaslighting (MG) and their underlying threats to principles of Bioethics. DM refers to mistreatment and negative patient-physician interactions. In most studies on DM, patients perceived physicians as invalidating their illness, as uniformed, as blaming and stigmatizing them, misunderstanding their condition, insensitive, rushing the visit, refusing to discuss pain, rude, and failing to maintain eye contact, listen, and to provide appropriate information about causes and treatments. A special case of DM is MG, referring to the experience of patients when their medical complaints and suffering are discounted, doubted, questioned, second guessed, or denied by physicians causing patients self-doubts. DM and MG may occur, at times, unintentionally Durbhakula and Fortin [1] and Fielding-Singh and Dmowska [2], resulting in severe ramifications. Surprisingly, existing reports focused on the clinical, economic, psychological, and emotional ramifications of DM and MG (Braeuninger-Weimer et al., 2019
Burke, 2019
Street et al., 2019
Merone et al., 2022
Claréus and Renström, 2019
Sheehan, 2020
Turan et al., 2019
Penner and Paul, 2017
Au et al., 2022
Dolezal, 2022
Shapiro and Hayburn, 2024
Fuss et al., 2024
Hunt, 2022) [3-15], rather than on the infringement of bioethics, which is the focus of this Discussion paper. CONCLUSIONS: DM and MG not only cause patients to feel stigma, prejudice, shame, and blame, and develop fear of seeking clinical help but also, constitute infringements of beneficence, non-malfeasance, respect for patient right of autonomy, and distributive justice in patient care. This Discussion paper calls for more education about the implicit ethical aspects of these phenomena and policy modifications to efface DM and MG.