One of the most frustrating things about the body is that it only has so many ways of telling us what's wrong with it. There are symptoms that give doctors something to work with, but the conditions these symptoms point to can often overlap.
So it's understandable that misdiagnoses can happen. However, some women and patients of color have reported a problem that makes this confusion worse. Namely, it's that when they are deeply in pain and have reason to suspect a certain condition is causing that, they find their concerns dismissed by doctors.
And as one rough story illustrates, it can lead to much more perilous situations when doctors don't believe what their patients have to tell them until it becomes impossible to ignore.