Why Are So Many Women Distrustful of The Healthcare System? It’s A Feature, Not a Bug
It’s no secret that women are becoming increasingly more distrustful of the healthcare system. This declining trust is sadly all too common and leads to important medical decisions being made without evidence-based, informed consent. It’s the natural reaction to a system that is overburdened, understaffed and results in a pattern of dismissal, diagnostic delay and a sprinkle of “try losing weight,” especially for female patients.
Providers need to earn that trust back, and trust that has been lost is harder to regain the second time around.
We hear all the time from patients that they no longer have any faith in the system or their provider. We’re not here to judge. In fact, we understand completely. Women will spend months, sometimes years, bouncing between waitlist after waitlist. All this only to arrive at a clinic and be seen for 15 minutes followed by: It’s probably just anxiety. Or depression. Everyone has period cramps.
We aren’t here to knock anyone’s struggles with mental health and always encourage patients suffering to seek support and care. But when the problem is a bright red endometriosis-shaped elephant in the room, further investigation is necessary.
Can You Trust Your Healthcare Provider?
There are different types of trust that impact the provider-patient relationship. While you might not have trust in the system as an entity (institutional trust), you might trust specific providers (interpersonal trust) because they’ve proven themselves to be trustworthy. Simultaneously, you may have epistemic trust (willingness to take information from a source as reliable) from sources that you see online who may or may not have the educational training to provide care.
Why Don’t Women Trust Their Healthcare Providers?
Quite simply, healthcare has a documented history of dismissing women’s pain and lived experiences.
We could start with “female hysteria”, a once common medical diagnosis for women thought to be caused by wandering wombs (seriously), with treatments ranging from bloodlettings to beatings.1,2 Thankfully we are no longer subjected to leeches and physical abuse, but the misdiagnoses and handwaving remain.
Or we could also discuss how women of childbearing age were routinely excluded from drug trials to protect potential fetuses from drug-induced birth defects.3 Unfortunately this resulted in a data gap with women being prescribed drugs whose effects were extrapolated from men.
But these were different times… Right?
Flash forward to recent literature: Women wait longer for pain medication, are more likely to have pain attributed to psychological causes and are undertreated for equivalent reported severity when compared to men.4
Is it any wonder women have low institutional trust and are rejecting the standard of care? This distrust is a pattern-recognition response to a system that has repeatedly failed to take women’s pain seriously.
Who Do Women Trust Instead of Their Healthcare Provider?
Other women. Friends, family, and the internet fill the gap, but that guidance isn't always accurate, and it isn't always safe.
When the clinic stops feeling like a reliable source of answers, women don't stop looking for answers. They just look somewhere else. Peer influence on health decisions is well documented. One study found that a 10% increase in classmates using a given treatment raised an individual's own likelihood of use by about 5%.5 That influence goes both ways, though. Research also shows that adolescents whose peers held negative attitudes toward medical treatments were significantly more likely to become non-users later in adulthood.5 The implication here is that the opinions absorbed during the formative years can quietly shape health decisions for decades.
Social media has only amplified this effect. A recent analysis of Reddit health posts from adolescents, young adults, and caregivers found that 60% conveyed negative emotions and 28% expressed mistrust toward the medical system.6 The platform was used to seek medical or behavioral advice in 38% of posts.6 Separately, a survey of young women who follow health influencers found that roughly 80% searched online before filling a prescription, and the women with the lowest health knowledge were the most likely to have gotten their information from friends and social media rather than a provider.7
Research also shows that how trustworthy and knowledgeable an influencer seems directly predicts a woman's intention to use alternative or non-hormonal health management. This is regardless of whether that influencer has any medical training at all.8
We discussed the harm that this can cause directly in a previous post on why women are quitting birth control. The loudest, most emotionally impactful voice in the room isn't always the most medically accurate one. Women aren’t naïve for trusting peers and online communities. Sadly, peers and online communities are often the only sources that make women feel heard. Even when they're not the most reliable source of clinical information.
What's Broken in the Current Healthcare Model?
Three things, mainly: How long it takes to get a diagnosis, how little the care is built around the patient, and how rarely informed consent is treated as a real conversation instead of a formality.
1. It takes too long to get a diagnosis: For many women, the path to a correct diagnosis is often convoluted. We’ve written before that for women with complex conditions like endometriosis, it can take years of referrals, wait lists, specialists, and "let's just wait and see." Can we blame women for looking for help elsewhere?
2. Care isn't built around the patient: Patient centered care should be exactly that: care that puts the patient at the centre of the decision making. It should make room for her to voice her beliefs and concerns, communicate with her clearly, and treat the whole picture of her health as connected rather than a list of isolated symptoms. When that's missing, appointments feel like something that happens to a patient rather than with her.
3. Informed consent is often rushed: This should be a communication process where a healthcare provider explains the risks, benefits and options of a treatment. A patient needs to thoroughly understand the options laid out before them before arriving at a choice. What they don’t need is to be pressured and told what medication they should take without an explanation of why.
This looks like providers and patients working together toward a choice that's medically sound and wanted. Women who experience shared decision-making report greater satisfaction with both their counseling and their chosen treatment than those who don’t.9 Women who sensed their provider already had a preferred outcome in mind were less satisfied with their treatment, even when the treatment itself was appropriate.9
Who Can Women Trust in Healthcare?
Women’s distrust of the healthcare system is the predictable reaction to a system that has ignored their needs and infantilized their problems. In the absence of trust, women have found other places to turn. Many of these sources are well-meaning, few of them are medically accountable.
July Health prides itself on being different. We aren’t asking you to abandon the community and peer support that's carried you this far but are offering a combination of what you can find online with trained medical guidance.
All our practitioners have their own stories of being dismissed and ignored medically, that’s why we pride ourselves on our anti-dismissal model. We’re here to listen and take your experience seriously while offering what only trained medical guidance can provide: accurate, evidence-based information and a genuine shared decision-making process.
You shouldn't have to choose between being heard and being informed. You deserve both.
Book a session today to get started.
This is Part 1 of a series on trust in women's healthcare. In Part 2, we'll dig into what patient-centered care looks like in practice.
References:
1. Meek H. Medical men, women of letters, and treatments for eighteenth-century hysteria. J Med Humanit. 2013 Mar;34(1):1-14. doi: 10.1007/s10912-012-9194-4. PMID: 23192402.
2. Madva EN, Ross DA, Cooper JJ. What's All the Hysteria About? A Modern Perspective on Functional Neurological Disorders. Biol Psychiatry. 2019 Jan 15;85(2):e3-e4. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2018.11.003. Erratum in: Biol Psychiatry. 2019 Mar 1;85(5):434. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2019.01.005. PMID: 30573052; PMCID: PMC6444349.
3. Waltz M, Lyerly AD, Fisher JA. Exclusion of Women from Phase I Trials: Perspectives from Investigators and Research Oversight Officials. Ethics Hum Res. 2023 Nov-Dec;45(6):19-30. doi: 10.1002/eahr.500170. PMID: 37988277; PMCID: PMC10759148.
4. Hoffmann DE, Tarzian AJ. The girl who cried pain: a bias against women in the treatment of pain. J Law Med Ethics. 2001 Spring;29(1):13-27. doi: 10.1111/j.1748-720x.2001.tb00037.x. PMID: 11521267.
5. Ali M, Tran NT. Defining counselling in contraceptive information and services: outcomes from an expert think tank. BMJ Sex Reprod Health. 2022;48(2):79-81. doi:10.1136/bmjsrh-2021-201132
6. Smith C, Cobos C, Odom-Konja R, et al. Contraception-Related Posts from Adolescents, Young Adults, and Caregivers on Reddit: A Qualitative Content Analysis. Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology. Published online January 29, 2026. doi:10.1016/j.jpag.2026.01.004
7. Yu V, Southard RA, Nelson AL. Is Women’s Knowledge About Oral Contraception Affected by Social Media? [ID 2683506]. Obstetrics & Gynecology. 2024;143(5S):10S. doi:10.1097/01.AOG.0001012976.20597.5c
8. Pfender EJ, Caplan SE. The Effect of Social Media Influencer Warranting Cues on Intentions to Use Non-Hormonal Contraception. Health Communication. 2024;0(0):1-15. doi:10.1080/10410236.2024.2402161
9. Dehlendorf C, Grumbach K, Schmittdiel JA, Steinauer J. Shared decision making in contraceptive counseling. Contraception. 2017;95(5):452-455. doi:10.1016/j.contraception.2016.12.010
