How is Your Pain (xxxx) today?

What a lovely way to pre-frame your therapy/treatment sessions!

Without resisting the opportunity for even more sarcasm, this was the chat I had with my pilates teacher/injury rehab facilitator this morning as I had some more critical examination of my faulty knee.
We both agreed that this kind of pre-framing almost trashes any efficacy before treatment has even started...and yet in mainstream healthcare this is a very regular occurrence. This "culture" for want of a better word leads on to the fairly liberal resorting to the chemical solution in far too many cases.

Take dementia/Alzheimer's treatments for instance. Here is a comment from the Alzheimer's Society - http://alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/news_article.php?newsID=228 and the BBC Panorama programme referred to is not available to view any more but the following article remains - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/7104212.stm.

Living with and "minding" my father (who has dementia and is 91) I have noticed how best to manage his condition drug-free that makes it best for him, and easiest to manage. We all 'have our moments' with him of course, but essentially he potters along quite happily with no treatment - except for supplementary vitamin B12 course administered via his local GP. The fact that this has lapsed over the last 9 months due to "failures of the local system" is disappointing because it clearly made a difference for him when it was regular. There's a long way between vitamin B12 and anti-psychotic drugs however!

So - to get back to the pre-framing, very early on as an NLP'er I came to understand that certain words had the most negative effect on rapport and states, and that there are positive alternatives that open up all the possibilities for clearer (and cleaner) channels of communication.

Imagine the conversation with my father using the above question.....
"How is your memory (or dementia even) today?" - reply - "What? Huh? Sorry I don't know what you're talking about."

PW