How to Talk To Friends and Family about their Health

It is natural to want to help family and friends when they are struggling with their health and current health interventions don’t seem to be working. However, it is equally frustrating when your well-meaning (and often well-researched) advice seems to fall on deaf ears and the person in question settles into a slow steady decline. Here are a few observations gleaned over the years in clinical practice on how to talk to friends and family about their health.
 

Do they want help? 

Firstly, it is impossible to help anyone unless they want to be helped. In my early days in practice, patients would often bring relatives to see me who they thought I could help.  This was successful on many occasions except when the person had not come on their own volition. 

So, the first thing to do is to ask the person if they would like help. However, don’t be dismayed or surprised if the answer is ‘No.’ For whatever reason, not everybody wants help as it can be an emotionally charged subject. Problems arise when people have wanted help in the past and instead been betrayed. This can happen in any sphere of life, not just healthcare. From then on, they are wary of all help as betrayal. Others have taken previous offers of help, only for them to fail. Therefore, they come to believe help is not possible and a waste of time.

Ask someone first do they want help with their health problem. If the answer is ‘Yes,’ this opens the door to a conversation. If the answer is ‘No,’ you could ask them do they think help is possible (in any area of life). Be prepared for some surprising answers. You can have a  general conversation about whether it is possible to help anybody these days and so on. The person might tell you about the occasions they have failed to help someone in the past.  They might even have a change of heart in so doing and decide that some help might be possible after all. But don’t be disappointed if they don’t. Respect their decision, frustrating though it may be.

Find out what is most real to them

If you think someone should be handling Health Problem A and their attention is on Problem B, how successful will you be in trying to help them?  I see this particularly in areas of addition.  A lifelong smoker comes in with a lab test that shows cigarette toxins stuck to his DNA - a precursor to cancerous changes - and he still doesn’t see why he should give up smoking.  That is because he is not worried about cancer. But someone tells him that he stinks might motivate him to give up - because he has more reality on smelling foul than getting cancer.

Therefore, when trying to motivate friends and relatives, have a conversation to find out what is most real to them and find out what they would really like to handle. Again, be prepared for surprises.

Recognising Fixed Ideas

Some people may be resistant to anyone trying to help them because of fixed ideas.  Fixed ideas can arise from one’s upbringing, other people or education.

A few include:

• Happy to hand over total responsibility for your healthcare to others. This is related to the old fashioned ‘doctor knows best’ attitude reflected in the Carry On films where corpulent consultant Sir Lancelot Spratt is treated like a god on the wards.  Some people still feel that their healthcare is fundamentally someone else’s responsibility - the State, their GP, their consultant etc.  This way, they don’t have to think about their problem.  Except that, they still have to live in their own body.  And with medical errors now named as the third leading cause of death, is it really wise to leave decisions to the ‘experts?’

• Being fooled into thinking that drugs address the causes of a condition and will result in a cure.  Drugs give temporary relief from symptoms but they don’t cure. This is like putting sticky plaster over the warning light in a car.  If people don’t address the root causes of their condition, it will keep coming back like a boomerang no matter what treatments are given.  This may be a new concept for many people used to suppressing symptoms with medications and not having to think about things until they go really wrong.  But it shouldn’t be totally alien if you run something called a car.  What would you think of a mechanic who kept telling you he had no idea why the engine warning light kept coming on and you should run your car anyway (until it failed its MOT)?  You would certainly want your mechanic to hunt for the reason why the light was flashing and fix it, wouldn’t you? Why should you accept anything less for your own body?

• Healthcare should be free and I shouldn’t have to pay a penny for it.   This has its origins in the Welfare State which was introduced in the 1942 Beveridge Report by the Prime Minister of the day, Clement Attlee. It heralded a national system of benefits which was introduced to provide ‘social security’ so that the population would be protected from the ‘cradle to the grave.’ This included a National Health Service in 1948 with free medical treatment for all.  The concept had a noble origin - to fight the five ‘Giant Evils’ of ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.’

• Medical conditions have changed dramatically in the decades since the days of Attlee and Beveridge.  We now have a pandemic of chronic complex conditions driven by infections and inflammation. The NHS, still excellent for many things, simply doesn’t have the tools to cope with chronic conditions. But other forms of medicine, including Functional Medicine, do.  That is why so many people access private medical tests to get to the root causes of their condition.  In reality, no medical system is ‘free.’  As taxpayers, we pay for the NHS.

• Needing approval from others. Some people need others’ approval for their decisions instead of doing their own research and making their own informed decisions. They may feel their doctor or dentist knows so much more than they do.  So they should. But medical personnel are not gods, they are not researchers and they are only as good as their training.  The patient, not anybody else, will have to live with the consequences of those medical interventions.
  

If you would like to explore any of the above issues, please contact the Good Health Clinic on 07836 552936 or email to goodhealthclinic@outlook.com.