 Next week, at the International Conference on Communication in Healthcare (ICCH) in Belfast, I am presenting 2 sessions: One on Wednesday about navigating emotions in chronic pain care (with Dr. Miriam Dillon) and one on Thursday called "There is no biomedical cause for this person’s chronic pain: What do I say? What do I do?"
Many persistent physical symptoms, such as chronic pain, are deemed “medically unexplained” or psychosomatic. Clinicians may struggle to know what to do or say when they meet a patient with such symptoms. Qualitative literature is replete with examples of patients feeling dismissed, unheard, or disbelieved (I wrote a brief summary here). In this interactive Creative Healthcare Communication session, I will be working directly with the audience to build a deeper understanding of how to make clinical encounters with patients with such symptoms into healing encounters. As I described in the abstract that was accepted for the conference: I will begin the session by embodying and explaining to the audience what my own chronic pain symptoms were, as if the audience were my clinicians. I'll ask, What would you say to me? How would you proceed? I'll demonstrate how my own GP encounter proceeded, and how I completely recovered from chronic pain by exiting the medical system (in Germany) altogether. Finally, I will leave the participants with tips for making their own clinical encounters into healing encounters. Duration: 30 minutes Engagement: The audience will be engaged from the beginning of the session as if they were the treating clinician. Their interaction and engagement are central to the performance, bookended by my initial entrance and final re-enactment of my personal experiences. This is how the session will go: 5 minutes: Explanation and embodiment of the chronic pain I experienced 15 minutes: How would the audience, acting as clinicians, proceed? I'll interact with the audience in double roles: as patient and as myself--an experienced chronic-pain researcher whose focus is person-centered communication. The audience is encouraged to offer recommendations for what to say and do as a clinician who knows that their patient is experiencing psychosomatic symptoms. The spirit is one of openness and trial and error, as this is an area of little or no training for most clinicians. 10 minutes: I will act out the single clinical encounter I had with a GP, 5 months after my chronic pain started, and demonstrate to the audience how that unhelpful experience could have been transformed into a healing encounter. Creative elements: Performance, interactive role play, and my double consciousness as both patient and expert. Why is this session needed? Patient voices are needed in healthcare communication training. I am an experienced communication researcher and instructor whose training as a wellness coach transformed how I worked with my clients with chronic pain conditions. My personal experience as a patient demonstrated how often clinicians need help communicating about psychosomatic chronic pain. Join me next week on Thursday! You can register for a one-day pass by clicking here.
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The event I spoke at was a regularly scheduled Qualitätszirkel, a sort of grand rounds where someone presents a patient’s story and the group of physicians and therapists who attend discuss and sometimes argue about how best to care for the patient.
So here I was, presenting my own case in front of about 12 German-speaking clinicians from all backgrounds, with clinical experience ranging from 6 months to 40 years. Just after presenting my ethnographic case study of healing at the European Association of Psychosomatic Medicine, I was interviewed for the podcast, “The Story Behind the Symptoms,” from the Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms (ATNS). David Clarke, MD, the president of the ATNS, is a kind and lovely man who does a wonderful job of interviewing people like me who have fully recovered from neuroplastic symptoms like chronic widespread pain. He, like many people, found it fascinating that I experienced such pain while finishing up my PhD on chronic pain! But it was truly that fact that saved me. I had just spent 4 solid years deeply researching the theories and treatments surrounding chronic pain and other symptoms, so I knew what most people don’t: The medical system just isn’t built around neuroplasticity.
Those of us who heal typically do so only after exiting the medical system. I find that a crying shame—truly a shame. The pharma industry has such a stranglehold on medical education, and somehow this arbitrary divide between brain and body persists. (Tell me, how is your brain NOT part of your body?) In this interview, we touch on many things, among them repressed emotions, EMDR therapy, triggers, ACEs, and social support. If you treat people with chronic pain or have such pain yourself, I hope you will find insights here that help you on your journey. The 13th annual conference of the European Association of Psychosomatic Medicine took place June 16 to 19, 2026, in Florence, Italy. Bright and early on the morning of the 17th, I presented my autoethnographic case study of disabling widespread pain and its resolution, "When Chronic Pain Researcher Becomes Chronic Pain Patient." Slides and a video of the presentation are now available. Please see this page for instructions on how to request access to these materials.  Click the image to request access to the presentation.
When it comes to treating someone with chronic pain or other conditions that seem to defy a standard treatment approach, words—and the way they are delivered by clinicians—really matter. My research showed the challenges clinicians face when they try to explain adolescent nonspecific persistent back pain to parents using the biopsychosocial model (Hauber et al., 2025). They also struggled to form effective treatment relationships in a triad—not only with their young patient, but also with the parent legally responsible for the patient. Research on adults with chronic pain shows that when they rate their clinicians as having good communication skills, including empathy, the patients’ pain intensity is lower (Licciardone et al., 2024; Ruben et al., 2018).  However, skills training in how to communicate with patients about social stressors, the social aspects of pain, and the biopsychosocial model is either limited in their formal education or not practiced enough to make it feel normal and natural (Thompson et al., 2018; van Dijk et al., 2023).
Left on one’s own, it’s hard to figure out how to explain how psychosocial factors affect pain without making the patient feel invalidated or disbelieved.  On May 8, 2026, I’ll be joining physiotherapists in the UK at the Association of Paediatric Chartered Physiotherapists’ (APCP) Paediatric and Adolescent Spine Course. My role on the day is to teach them about the research on adolescent nonspecific persistent back pain and provide them some practical ways to better use the biopsychosocial model in practice.
The title of my session: Addressing Psychosocial and Communication Challenges in Clinical Encounters with Adolecents with Nonspecific Persistent Back Pain and their Parents. Many of the physiotherapists who attend will be treating patients with acute back pain, as well as the persistent back pain in which I speclialize. However, person-centered communication techniques are relevant in both cases. In acute cases, it’s crucial to rule out red flags, such as difficulty walking or weakness in the legs, problems controlling urination or bowel movement, fever/chills, unexpected weight loss, and numbness in the buttocks, groin, or inner thighs. 3/20/2026 0 Comments Why should you read my PhD thesis?As part of any PhD program, candidates need to perform research and present their work in a huge final document called a thesis (in Ireland and the UK) or dissertation (in the US and some parts of the EU).
Given that this document comprises at least 4 full years of research, these documents are always more than a hundred pages long. Most of them are 200 to 300 pages, including appendices and reference lists. As a doctoral student, I read several PhD theses because (1) they were fascinating to read, and (2) they were directly relevant to my own research on adolescent nonspecific persistent back pain treatment. But why would you, a busy clinician, want to read my thesis? May I humbly suggest three reasons: |
