Dr Minha presented “The Patient Perspective: Challenges in Consultation” at Challenges in the Medical Consultation, the joint meeting of the Forgotten Patients, Overlooked Diseases charity (FPOD) and the Guild of Health Writers, held in London on 26 June 2025.
The pairing of hosts was the point. The Guild of Health Writers, founded in 1994 to promote high professional standards in health journalism, brought the writers; FPOD brought the clinicians and patients; and together they confronted the medical consultation itself: doctor–patient bias, “persona”, so-called medical gaslighting, and the difficult art of acknowledging diagnostic doubt. The day’s programme ranged from Dr Adrian Tookman on why consultations sometimes go wrong, to Professor Chris Burton’s researcher’s view of medically unexplained symptoms, to first-hand patient experiences from Christianne Forrest and Katia Chrysostomou.
Dr Minha’s session put the patient’s side of the consulting-room desk at the centre of the conversation. It is a perspective she holds with unusual authority: a physician with more than 25 years across conventional, osteopathic and naturopathic medicine, and a former patient whose own journey through serious illness reshaped how she practises. For patients who have left appointments feeling unheard, and for clinicians who want to do better within real-world time pressures, her talk offers both recognition and practical hope.
She opened with the idea that anchors all her work, that you are more than your illness (Curaidh means “champion” in Scots Gaelic). 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 the power to bridge professional expertise and public understanding, and a responsibility, in an age of celebrity supplement claims, to hold that knowledge to the highest standard.
Her closing thought captured the spirit of the day: the best way to predict the future is to co-create it, moving beyond the tick-box approach towards total health, with clinician and patient working as partners rather than across a desk.
The themes run straight into Curaidh Clinic’s daily work: longer consultations, genuine listening, and integrative medicine pathways for persistent pain, fatigue and medically unexplained symptoms.
Explore the full event: Challenges in the Medical Consultation, 26 June 2025, or read the full story of the meeting in Expert Insights.
