Challenges in the Medical Consultation: FPOD and the Guild of Health Writers
Dr Minha’s talk on bias, gaslighting and diagnostic doubt at ‘Challenges in the Medical Consultation’, an FPOD & Guild of Health Writers meeting.
In June 2025, Dr Minha joined clinicians, writers and patient advocates in London for “Challenges in the Medical Consultation,” a joint meeting of the Forgotten Patients, Overlooked Diseases charity (FPOD) and the Guild of Health Writers. FPOD exists for the patients medicine finds hardest to help, those with medically unexplained symptoms and overlooked conditions, while the Guild of Health Writers, founded in 1994, exists to raise the standard of health journalism. Bringing the two together was itself the idea: the story a patient tells, and the way it is heard, written and acted upon.
The programme went straight at the uncomfortable heart of the consulting room. Sessions tackled doctor–patient bias and “persona”, so-called medical gaslighting, the subject of a narrative review by FPOD’s Dr Steven Walker, the problem of diagnostic uncertainty, and the ethics of the consultation itself, with contributions from Dr Adrian Tookman on why consultations sometimes go wrong, Professor Chris Burton on the researcher’s view of medically unexplained symptoms, Louise Fish on the particular challenge of diagnosing rare and genetic conditions, and Chantal Patel on the ethics of the consultation, while patients Christianne Forrest and Katia Chrysostomou, and health journalist Jo Waters, spoke to their own experience before the day closed with an open question-and-answer session.
Dr Minha’s contribution, “The Patient Perspective: Challenges in Consultation,” put the patient’s side of the desk at the centre of the conversation, a perspective she holds with unusual authority, as a doctor with more than 25 years across conventional, osteopathic and naturopathic medicine, and as someone who has been a seriously ill patient herself. Speaking to a room that included the Guild’s health writers, she made a direct appeal to them: medical writers, she said, are “the gatekeepers of knowledge,” with a responsibility, in an age of celebrity supplement claims, to hold it to the highest standard. You can watch her talk in our media library.
Dr Minha gives her time to FPOD pro bono as a medical advisor, in a partnership that has spanned meetings at the Royal Society of Medicine and the Royal College of Physicians. The themes of the day, longer consultations, genuine listening, and taking unexplained symptoms seriously, are not abstractions at Curaidh Clinic; they are how it works every day.
