Why the Healthcare System Is Failing Chronic Pain Patients with Shabnam Rakhiba

There's a few things to come back to.

So the first one is this massive system problem, which has been a theme that every single person that I've spoken to has said, is that actually our system is based on this idea that healthcare professionals are completely infallible, that they know everything.

And there are so many situations in which that's not true.

And actually, it can be really helpful to embrace ambiguity and to not speak with so much certainty about things.

You leaving those appointments feeling, what's the point? I feel dejected in that situation.

And it's because of this lack of ambiguity, I think, things that we understand, we treat with a huge amount of confidence and things that we don't understand, we often end up kind of putting all of the onus on the person who's suffering rather than on the healthcare professionals to figure it out.

And people enter into healthcare professions because of care, it's in the name, it's ideally the majority of people should be compassionate, they should be there to try and support other people.

And It's the system barriers and also the communication barriers that seem to lead to these feelings, which are shared by so many people.

What's the point in going back and not being heard, not being respected?

Yes, absolutely.

I've had so many experiences and you're completely right in what you are saying.

Patients live differently.

disappointment, feeling that they haven't been heard, they haven't been listened to.

And the problem is coming from the fact that healthcare professionals, doctors are not willing to listen to us, to our experience.

I often think that they don't seem to realize that we've been living in this body for years.

We know when something is wrong with our body, when something doesn't feel normal for us, for our life, for our body.

So these experiences, they matter.

And it is up to the professional to listen to what we are saying.

And they don't need to have the answers.

Doctors do not need to have all the answers over certainty.

When we go to them, yes, maybe in the beginning, that's what we are expecting, that they'll give us a diagnosis and a treatment plan and we are cured.

But we do begin to understand, okay, they do not have all the answers.

So what do we want from them? What We want understanding, support and a willingness to help us work through it and to listen to us when we are saying that, OK, this is what I think maybe this is.

Could we try maybe explore a little bit more along these lines? This is what we are looking for.

I remember quite early in my journey, I was going to my GP to try to understand what was happening with the pain.