Doctors, Stop Telling Your Patients, ‘It’s Normal’

PhD student Seyi Lawal describes in a research article published in Nature Human Behaviour, how she found that when a doctor reassures a patient that an experience is normal, many patients interpret that as a dismissive cue to not seek further treatment. Clinicians, it’s.

Providing a quick reassurance that your patient is experiencing something many people have gone through before may seem to you like a simple way to reassure them that they can be treated. To the patient, however, the message ‘It’s normal’ is oft received as.

What Happened

Providers expected that normalizing a patient’s symptoms would increase their treatment likelihood, or, at worst, have no impact, but patients actually reacted in the opposite way,’ Laval explained to UCSD’s press office. The results suggest that clinicians could do with some bedside.

• Lawal and her colleagues conducted fourteen studies involving 9,371 participants to better understand why some patients don’t pursue treatment for ongoing medical conditions after seeing their doctor.

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• From “dismissal” to “medical gaslighting”: A literature review of women’s experiences of reproductive health services in the UK.

Key Details

Lawal was prompted to look into why patients report feeling dismissed or ‘gaslit’ by medical professionals after interviewing women about their experiences around menopause care. This problem is not localized to the US either.

• Kokab F, Williams SJ, Hussain N, Gale N.

• For patients, if your doctor tells you a symptom or condition is normal, don’t assume they mean it’s not worth treating.

• Make sure that your patient understands that you intend ‘normal’ as in, you see it often, not that they shouldn’t be complaining.

Why It Matters

Women in the UK say, the feeling of being minimized, discounted or gaslit is common to many attempting to access health care. Likewise, Canadian patients living with chronic pain report feelings of invalidation and a lack of trust in health care providers.

• For doctors, if you tell a patient something is normal, pair it with an explicit recommendation for treatment.

• In short, they found that when doctors told patients that a symptom or health complaint was “normal”, members of the public were less likely to say they would pursue medical treatment for the problem.

What Reports Say

Coverage of the story so far points to:

• Continued reporting by Medical News Bulletin as more details emerge