“Medicine has a long-standing history of training physicians to interpret many symptoms in women through the framework of somatization, a concept that attributes physical symptoms to psychological or emotional distress […] with an implicit bias that whispers, ‘It’s all in her head.’ I wish I were kidding.”

This passage establishes the theme of Confronting Medical Gaslighting by identifying a systemic failure within medical training that impacts women specifically. The author uses clinical terminology like “somatization” and “implicit bias” to frame the issue academically before personifying the bias as a “whisper,” suggesting its insidious and ingrained nature. The shift to a colloquial, first-person tone in the final sentence—“I wish I were kidding”—creates a direct, empathetic connection with the reader, validating their experiences of dismissal.

“Yes, at a time when within seconds we can jump on a video call with a friend half a world away or order a new pair of our favorite leggings […] it takes in some cases more than seventeen years for your doctor to learn about and incorporate new scientific developments.”

The author uses a startling statistic—the 17-year evidence-to-practice gap, wherein new medical research struggles to be incorporated into broader practices—to quantify the institutional inertia harming patients. By juxtaposing this medical stagnation with the speed of modern consumer technology (“video call,” “leggings”), Haver creates a rhetorical contrast that casts the medical system’s dysfunction as anachronistic and unacceptable. This framing argues that the “status quo” of perimenopausal care is a correctable systemic failure, not an inevitability.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that the hormonal volatility associated with perimenopause activates changes that affect a woman’s health, and that these changes happen at an accelerated rate independent of aging.”

Here, the author dismisses the idea of perimenopause as a simple function of aging; instead, she presents it as a distinct biological event with its own accelerated timeline. The phrase “independent of aging” is a critical rhetorical move, separating hormonal health from the generalized, and often dismissed, category of “getting older.