Back at the Royal College of Physicians: FPOD's Enduring Symptoms Conference
At the Royal College of Physicians, Dr Minha presented on antiphospholipid syndrome with expert patient Tracy Jallow BEM for FPOD’s 2026 conference.
In June 2026, Dr Minha returned to London to join the Forgotten Patients, Overlooked Diseases charity (FPOD) at the Royal College of Physicians for “Enduring Symptoms: From Patient Voices to Solution-Driven Care”, held on 24 June 2026, a conference devoted to the persistent, unresolved presentations that outlast tests, referrals and treatments, and too often outlast their doctors’ attention. There is a quiet significance in the setting: the Royal College of Physicians, founded in 1518 and the oldest medical college in England, giving its floor to a charity built for the very patients medicine has tended to overlook.
The group photograph on the College’s famous staircase captures the spirit of it. Professor Dame Lesley Regan, England’s first Women’s Health Ambassador and a former President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, opened the day, and its first hour belonged to patient voices, Dr Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner on how patient stories illuminate what really matters. FPOD’s gatherings bring GPs, hospital consultants, researchers, health writers and patient advocates together as equals, the same collaborative spirit that has run through every event in this series, from the first talk Dr Minha gave for the charity in 2022, through the 2024 Medically Unexplained Symptoms conference, the 2025 Guild of Health Writers meeting, and the Royal Society of Medicine’s GP Update later that year. This was her fifth collaboration with FPOD, to which she gives her time pro bono as a medical advisor.
Her session, “Navigating the Patient–Physician Dynamic Through the Lens of Antiphospholipid Syndrome,” was delivered alongside expert patient Tracy Jallow BEM, who lived with the condition for seventeen years before her diagnosis, years of inconclusive tests that she has since turned into education for the next generation of clinicians. Antiphospholipid syndrome, an autoimmune clotting disorder that is frequently missed for years, became the lens through which they explored the relationship between doctor and patient: what it looks like when it works, and what it costs when it does not. Their closing thought, delivered together, captured it: the dots join when patient and physician co-create. You can watch the talk in our media library.
Patients with enduring, unexplained symptoms are not a niche interest at Curaidh Clinic. They are the heart of the work. That this partnership keeps growing, from a webinar in 2022 to the stage of the Royal College of Physicians, says something about how much appetite there is to take these patients seriously at last.
