Distrust and Conflict in Sickle Cell Disease: Intersecting Narratives of Patients and Physicians

A gap in trust between patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) and medical providers is well recognized, largely originating from repetitive requests for opioid analgesics. Although expert clinical care guidelines in sickle cell disease are available, they rarely address measures by which this endemic gap in trust may be narrowed to fulfill the goals of medicine. We hypothesized that an increased familiarity with the patient as an individual through exposure of physicians to first-person narratives of the life-world of SCD may allow reformulation of perceptions and narrow the gap between physicians and patients. In a pilot study, extended first-person narratives of the illness experience elicited from patients with SCD with a history of recurrent hospitalizations (n=10) point to the individualized impact of pain, illness and stigmatizing disruptions in life-building efforts imposed by SCD together with the recurrent conflicts with medical caregivers, particularly after transition from pediatric to adult medicine. Patient-elicited narrative fragments such as “You are constantly fighting with people who are supposed to be making us feel better”, “You don’t know me, I am a church boy!” and “Put down your microscopes and talk to us” reveal the yearning by patients for individual integrity to be acknowledged, absorbed and interpreted by physicians. Additional narrative fragments such as “I hate myself. I hate my life”, “Why am I broken?”, “you don’t want to be the girl with jaundice”, “I had to leave work for 2 months because I was hospitalized, it killed me, it killed me”, “you never know when it’s going to be the last day, the last moment”, exhibit the woundedness and fragility of existence experienced by patients. Narratives elicited separately from physicians caring for SCD (n=5) reveal anxiety, fear and distrust of the reported pain experience and opioid requests, and point toward deeper schisms that disparities may define: “I was very scared when I took care of my first sickle cell patient”, “I came in with a bias already”, “a similar frequent flier who had the same kind of behavior”, “you have to be careful with empathy, people can take advantage of it”, “I am not an enabler”, “My grandfather told me about these people”. Yet when the same physicians were invited to read and reflect on transcripts of the life-world stories of patients, reshaped perceptions of the stigmatized patient are revealed; “without knowing the story, you can’t put it all together”, “this would change the way I view treating them”, “I will have more patience now” as examples. However,  “Why can’t they listen to our story? It could help them to be better patients,” suggests that additional studies of the mutual intersections of patient and physician narratives are warranted and that these can offer insights and pathways toward mitigating distrust and conflict between medical care providers and patients with SCD.