> doctors dismiss patients as crazy or "making it up"
It's very easy to frame what doctors say like this, but in my experience at least that's not really what they're doing. A doctor is a classification machine - they take your symptoms as inputs and output a disease or a syndrome, hopefully with mitigation measures associated with it.
When my wife had long covid for 3 years and doctors couldn't find anything wrong with her a neurologist diagnosed her with a "functional neurological disorder" and suggested psychiatry. My wife felt dismissed and was really mad about it, but the reality is that some sets of symptoms are psychosomatic, and psychiatry can help, so if the neurologist saw 100 people with my wife's symptoms and made the same recommendation to them all, some of them would benefit (as opposed to her making no diagnosis and none of them benefiting)
It's very easy to frame what doctors say like this, but in my experience at least that's not really what they're doing. A doctor is a classification machine - they take your symptoms as inputs and output a disease or a syndrome, hopefully with mitigation measures associated with it.
When my wife had long covid for 3 years and doctors couldn't find anything wrong with her a neurologist diagnosed her with a "functional neurological disorder" and suggested psychiatry. My wife felt dismissed and was really mad about it, but the reality is that some sets of symptoms are psychosomatic, and psychiatry can help, so if the neurologist saw 100 people with my wife's symptoms and made the same recommendation to them all, some of them would benefit (as opposed to her making no diagnosis and none of them benefiting)