What should you say to your patients with medically unexplained pain?

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.