If you find yourself telling a patient ‘It’s normal’ during a consultation, you might want to revisit that conversation. Academics from the Rady School of Management, UCSD reported this week that well-meaning reassurance by doctors can backfire.
PhD student Seyi Lawal describes in a research article published in Nature Human Behaviour, how she found that when a doctor reassures a patient that an experience is normal, many patients interpret that as a dismissive cue to not seek further treatment.
Backfiring Bedside Manner
Clinicians, it’s time to rethink your approach to patient anxiety about their symptoms or prognosis. Providing a quick reassurance that your patient is experiencing something many people have gone through before may seem to you like a simple way to reassure them that they can be treated. To the patient, however, the message ‘It’s normal’ is oft received as ‘Don’t make a fuss’ or worse, ‘This isn’t worth my time’.
‘Providers expected that normalizing a patient’s symptoms would increase their treatment likelihood, or, at worst, have no impact, but patients actually reacted in the opposite way,’ Laval explained to UCSD’s press office. Lawal and her colleagues conducted fourteen studies involving 9,371 participants to better understand why some patients don’t pursue treatment for ongoing medical conditions after seeing their doctor. The results suggest that clinicians could do with some bedside manner refreshers.
Medical gaslighting
Lawal was prompted to look into why patients report feeling dismissed or ‘gaslit’ by medical professionals after interviewing women about their experiences around menopause care.
This problem is not localized to the US either. Women in the UK say, the feeling of being minimized, discounted or gaslit is common to many attempting to access health care. Likewise, Canadian patients living with chronic pain report feelings of invalidation and a lack of trust in health care providers after unfortunate experiences with conventional medical providers.
Lawal recounts how some of the patients she interviewed said they felt dismissed after being told menopause symptoms that were interfering with their daily life were a ‘normal part of aging’. This got her thinking, were the physicians and patients simply misunderstanding each other?
Knowing Me Knowing You
Lawal and her colleagues recruited over 9000 doctors and members of the public to participate in a series of experiments. The researchers created a set of realistic medical scenarios where a patient described their symptoms and a doctor advised that either the symptoms were ‘normal’ or did not. The medical scenarios covered a range of health complaints, including elevated blood glucose levels, seasonal allergies, dental pain, migraines and menopause.
The researchers asked members of the public to read through the scenarios and asked how they interpreted the exchange. Would they seek treatment through follow up care? The team also questioned doctors as to how they expected patients to react. Then they compared the doctor’s expectations and the patient’s willingness to pursue follow up care.
There was, they discovered, a disconnect between what doctors thought they were conveying and what patients understood. In short, they found that when doctors told patients that a symptom or health complaint was “normal”, members of the public were less likely to say they would pursue medical treatment for the problem.
As senior author On Amir explained in the press release, ‘Doctors usually have a noble goal. They mean to ease anxiety, but somehow it backfires,’ he continued: ‘Doctors shouldn’t stop reassuring patients. But they should make their meaning unmistakable.’
Say What You Mean
So what does that mean in practice? For doctors, if you tell a patient something is normal, pair it with an explicit recommendation for treatment. Make sure that your patient understands that you intend ‘normal’ as in, you see it often, not that they shouldn’t be complaining.
For patients, if your doctor tells you a symptom or condition is normal, don’t assume they mean it’s not worth treating.
Sources
Why a doctor saying “it’s normal” can backfire. EurekAlert! Accessed August 11, 2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1139392
Lawal S, Chew B, Amir O. Reassurance through normalization inadvertently suppresses treatment. Nat Hum Behav. Published online August 10, 2026:1-13. doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02542-0
Côté CI. Enacting Epistemic Justice to Promote Safer Care for People Living with Chronic Pain : A Clinician’s Guide to Action. J Bioeth Inq. Published online May 11, 2026. doi:10.1007/s11673-025-10543-3
Fuss A, Jagielski CH, Taft T. We didn’t start the fire…or did we?—a narrative review of medical gaslighting and introduction to medical invalidation. Transl Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2024;9:73. doi:10.21037/tgh-24-26
Kokab F, Williams SJ, Hussain N, Gale N. From “dismissal” to “medical gaslighting”: A literature review of women’s experiences of reproductive health services in the UK. Midwifery. 2026;159:104823. doi:10.1016/j.midw.2026.1048231.
Pickern JS, Ledford VA. Using the theory of communicative disenfranchisement to illuminate the nature and consequences of women’s experiences with medical gaslighting as told through TikTok narratives. Patient Educ Couns. 2026;150:109719. doi:10.1016/j.pec.2026.109719
