5. Conclusions
Communicating with patients about complex, chronic, and disabling illnesses can be an uncomfortable, nuanced, or highly emotional interaction that few healthcare professionals have been taught to engage in throughout their medical training. Clinicians may be apprehensive while approaching the diagnostic and therapeutic management of these complex chronic illnesses without proper training, diagnostic biomarkers, or FDA-approved therapies. Patients are likely to enter these relationships having already encountered multiple obstacles to obtaining effective and compassionate medical care, including dismissal, denial, misdiagnosis with psychiatric disorders, personalized biases, and medical neglect [5]. In addition, patients with Long COVID, ME/CFS, and other chronic disorders have experienced significant losses because of these disorders, and these losses have a negative impact on them and on their families. For these reasons, relationship-building skills, such as asking questions about their experiences prior to seeking care with you and conveying empathy, as well as avoiding never-words, will all be important to developing a strong therapeutic relationship.
While effective healthcare professional-patient communication should follow well-established structures and processes for communicating about serious illness, it should also avoid never-words that have special meaning within this unique healthcare situation—these never-words may be detrimental to effective communication and serve as significant barriers to effective clinical care and therapeutic relationships.