The Problem With Being Told Your Symptoms Are ‘Normal’

—Maskot—Getty Images There’s nothing quite like the anxiety of visiting your doctor with a worrisome new symptom.

And there’s nothing quite like the sublime relief when your doctor examines you and concludes that your symptoms are “normal.” But even though doctors love to give patients this type of reassurance, it sometimes backfires, according to a new study in Nature Human Behavior .

Just because a symptom is normal—hot flashes during menopause , musculoskeletal woes in seniors, migraine headaches in a person with a family history of them—doesn’t mean it needs no treatment, but patients whose doctors comfort them in this way may be less likely to pursue it.

“In the whole course of medical school, there's very little—maybe three hours in four years—that is devoted to patient reassurance,” says On Amir, professor of marketing at the University of California, San Diego’s Rady School of Management and a co-author of the new paper.

Yet it’s a skill: how a doctor delivers reassurance—or doesn’t—seems to influence what the patient decides to do next.

When the doctor normalizes symptoms, Amir adds, “the patient basically understands from that what they should and shouldn't do, and that’s not the intention at all.” Says Seyi Lawal, a graduate student at the UCSD’s Rady School of Management and a co-author of the paper: “On the provider side, it seems like the reason that they're normalizing is because they believe it's going to have a positive impact on the patient's mental state, which is understandable.

But there's a cautionary signal that people may take this one step further [and conclude that] the doctor doesn't think that it's necessary to do anything to treat it.” In the study, the researchers assembled a group of more than 9,300 people—some doctors, some other medical caregivers, some from the general population—and ran 14 different experiments on them.

In one, 400 people were presented with two scenarios in which a friend visited a doctor complaining of menopause symptoms, including extreme fatigue, weight gain, and joint and muscle pain.

In one of the scenarios, the doctor simply recommended medication to treat the symptoms.

In the other, the doctor added, “I know this feels overwhelming, but I want to reassure you that these symptoms are normal…You could take daily prescription medication…or you can deal with these symptoms.” People were then asked to predict whether patients would take the recommended medications.

They predicted that patients who hadn’t been reassured would be more likely to take them than those who had been told that the symptoms were normal.

“Every word that doctors use has meaning, it has weight,” says Lawal.

“Wanting to reassure patients effectively is an understandable and laudable goal for providers.