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Written by Dr. Martyn Williamson.

At the moment I’m engaged in the one of the more exciting tasks of my medical career! I’m working with two highly skilled NLP coaches, Dr. Amanda and Sarah Foo-Ryland and we are developing a course to help health professionals unlock the healing power of their words. Are you interested in enhancing the healing power of yourself as a doctor?

Early on in my medical career, I realised that how we use language can have an impact on patients both positive and negative. My understanding of this phenomenon was quite limited however, and was restricted to two broad domains.

The first of these domains I called labelling. Examples of this phenomenon include diagnostic labelling like diabetic or asthmatic which seeks to define people by their medical condition. I decided to do my best to avoid that trap and talk about people who suffer from diabetes in an attempt to remind myself and them that they were human beings not defined by their illness and its restrictions. 

The more troublesome side of labelling I’d identified and noticed as rife within the profession was the more pejorative sort of labelling such as poor historian, crumble, malingerer, drug seeker. 

The problem that I noticed with labels like this was that the labellers used the classification to justify less than optimal treatment of these patients in both the medical sense and purely human sense, which perpetuated the situation which the health professional complained about and prevented anyone seeing an alternative more productive approach. Countless people have been damaged by virtue of this simple linguistic trap.

The second domain was the one of assumed certainty when uncertainty prevailed. I noticed that this could be beneficial for patients who were struggling with the unknown whilst at the same time quite damaging in that the certainty could remove hope and close off possibilities. Examples that come to mind relate to predictions of the future. “You’ll never walk again” “He’s got 6/12 left to live” “She’ll always struggle with this”. All of these future predictions close off possibility for the human beings they are directed at and do untold and unrecognised damage.

However, there are lots of other linguistic traps that I’ve recently learnt about, and also how this impacts our subconscious mind.

Would you like to be able to communicate with your patients quickly and effectively, being able to help them through many facets of what we call functional illness and to help them break out of self-imposed traps? 

Would you like the skills to swiftly focus patients on the future to which they aspire and help them make significant and life changing transformations in life? Say good bye to the concept of heart sink patients? 

Well this could be the coursefor you.

Find out more about the course here