Evaluating the relative benefits of different treatments helps the authorities allocate healthcare resources to where they do the most good. Doctors in the UK rely on The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) for advice on the cost-effectiveness of treatments. It recommends that health benefits be valued in terms of "gains in quality adjusted life years" (QALYs). A simple algorithm assigns a value between 0 (for death) and 1 (for full health) to each health state and then multiplies that value by how long the state lasts.
Hmm ... The question is: How does NICE ascertain "quality"?
New Scientist’s cover story (16 May 2009) warning about the effect of language and belief on patients’ health and well-being is long overdue – but goes nowhere near far enough in alerting the medical community to the dangers of careless talk.
The most obvious, and yet the most overlooked, way to deal with heartsinks is not to have them in the first place.
This is less flippant than it sounds. Heartsinks don’t exist independently of the health professional. One of the original presuppositions of NLP was that you (the communicator) hold responsibility for the response you get. Or, to put it another way, if your patient or client behaves adversely, you need to change your tactics – and keep changing them until you get the response you are seeking.