The Problem With Being Told Your Symptoms Are ‘Normal’

There’s nothing quite like the anxiety of visiting your doctor with a worrisome new symptom. And there’s nothing quite like the sublime relief when your doctor examines you and concludes that your symptoms are “normal.” But even though doctors love to give patients this type of reassurance, it sometimes backfires, according to a new study in Nature Human Behavior. Just because a symptom is normal—hot flashes during menopause, musculoskeletal woes in seniors, migraine headaches in a person with a family history of them—doesn’t mean it needs no treatment, but patients whose doctors comfort them in this way may be less likely to pursue it.“In the whole course of medical school, there's very little—maybe three hours in four years—that is devoted to patient reassurance,” says On Amir, professor of marketing at the University of California, San Diego’s Rady School of Management and a co-author of the new paper. Yet it’s a skill: how a doctor delivers reassurance—or doesn’t—seems to influence what the patient decides to do next. When the doctor normalizes symptoms, Amir adds, “the patient basically understands from that what they should and shouldn't do, and that’s not the intention at al...