patient Archives - Hammersmith Books

What was the inspiration behind your book?

Experiencing the trauma and desperation of my life being turned upside down with the sudden onset of IBS symptoms fifteen years ago, and the lack of help available. This experience stayed with me and when I started to see and treat patients in my clinical practice who were going through the same experience, I knew I would one day write a book about it and Irritable Bowel Syndrome & Giardia is the end result of all that experience.

What was the most challenging part of writing the book?

This is my first book and when I started the project 10 years ago, I had no idea the amount of work that lay ahead to finally get it published. This book has the potential to change people’s lives for the better so it was important extreme care and research went into writing it. With a busy practice to run, I would often start writing at 10pm and finish at 2am – this has always been my quiet time and I could concentrate with no interruption.

What has been the most satisfying part of the writing process?

My aim is to pass my knowledge on to those who need it and as I delved deeper into the subject matter, to understand how and why the clinical observations and patterns of my patients were presenting themselves, I have found writing it down and putting all this information together in a manuscript, has allowed me to achieve this.

Did anything surprise you while writing IBS & Giardia?

About seven years ago I changed my treatment strategy to a more gentle approach and the results surprised and amazed me which is reflected in the book.

What sort of people would benefit most by reading your book?

This book is for anyone who is struggling with the health of their digestive system and other related disorders. It is also aimed at health professionals, both allopathic and alternative, who are treating these patients. It is my hope that the information contained in this book, and the personal testimonies of my patients who were suffering with what is currently a chronic and untreatable diagnosis, (IBS), will bring hope and healing to those who are unwitting hosts to the Giardia parasite. Of course I appreciate this parasite is not responsible for all digestive issues but in my experience a Giardia infestation is very often overlooked as the cause of digestive problems and this then leads to misdiagnosis and a life of misery for those affected.

Symptoms and signs

During any consultation, the patient and practitioner seek to bridge a gulf of subjective meaning. The events the patient notices and tries to describe are ‘symptoms’; the doctor, meanwhile, is also looking for ‘signs’—usually described as ‘objective indications’ of disease or disorder. In some cases, the disease is readily identifiable (say, jaundice) because the signs are evident.

Somatization, functional illness and hypochondriasis

However, where the practitioner favors signs to the exclusion of symptoms, problems can arise. In the absence of readily observable signs, due diligence and medico-legal concerns usually mean that the patient will be referred on to one or more specialists for further consultations and tests. Where no pathology is identified, the patient is at risk of being stigmatized as ‘somatizing’, suffering from ‘psychosomatic’, ‘somatoform’ or ‘conversion’ disorder, ‘functional illness’, or ‘hypochondriasis’.

None of these nominalized terms is particularly helpful, because none of them provides insight into the problem. Moreover, they tend to exclude the patient’s experience, the context within which his problem arises. Patients are quick to detect the underlying suggestion that what is ailing them is ‘all in the mind’. If they do not medicate the patient, many doctors are quick to outsource the problem to psychologists, psychiatrists, or counselors (where available), reinforcing the picture of troublesome neurotics wasting the medical profession’s valuable time.

The Medical NLP approach

Medical NLP regards ‘somatization’, with its overtones of neuroticism, as a fiction. Not only do imbalances within the body–mind system express themselves somatically, both as some kind of physical felt sense and in changes in cellular function or structure, but we cannot have any experience without some physical movement or manifestation.

As ‘open adaptive systems’, we humans are constantly processing billions of bits of data, both exteroceptive (from outside the body) and enteroceptive (from within), most of which are filtered out of our conscious awareness. When these processes pass a certain threshold, they come into the subject’s awareness as somatic events, which are then subjected to descriptions, inferences, and evaluations, by both the ‘experts’ reviewing the condition and the patient suffering from its effects.

Diagnosis is not the disease

However, we should not confuse the descriptions and inferences we use as convenient forms of classification with the event itself. The diagnosis is not the disease. The symptom is not the problem. The problem is the problem, and the symptom is the signal that the problem has not yet been recognized and resolved.

For more insight into bridging the gap between patient and practitioner using Medical NLP visit The Society of Medical NLP website and read Garner Thomson’s Magic in Practice: The Art and Science of Language in Healing and Health available as ebook and paperback.

Tag: patient

Irritable Bowel Syndrome & Giardia – A Q&A with Susan Koten