You are on the phone, and they have just told you it has been a bad week. You want to help, so you say the helpful thing. "Have you tried magnesium? A woman at work swears by it."
There is a pause. Then, flat: "Yeah. I've tried it."
The call ends a few minutes later. You are left holding the phone, wondering how a kind suggestion made things worse.
What your suggestion landed on
It landed on a long history you mostly haven't seen.
An Australian registry recorded 500 people with POTS, all patients of one specialist clinic. Before they were diagnosed, they had seen about five doctors on average. One in four had waited more than ten years.
By the time they joined the registry, they were seeing between seven and eight specialists on average.
So whatever comes after "have you tried", they may well have tried it. It arrives after years of appointments and attempts.
It can also carry a message you didn't mean to send. If the answer were that simple, they would be well by now. So a simple suggestion can sound like "you haven't really tried".
And some suggestions are riskier than they sound. Specialists writing about fatigue in EDS say that telling someone to "exercise more" without proper support is not helpful. They add that unsupervised exercise may make symptoms worse.
After enough of that, caution about new ideas is reasonable. It is not a judgement on you.
What stings, and what some people find helps
A couple of lines tend to land badly:
- "Have you tried…?" with almost anything after it. It assumes they haven't.
- "My friend had that and she's fine now." It turns their illness into a comparison they are losing.
Other lines leave the fixing out. Some people find these easier to hear. They won't suit everyone.
- "That sounds like a lot of trying already." It notices the work they have put in.
- "I read something that made me think of you. Do you want it, or not today?" It lets them say no.
- "I don't have a fix. I'm glad you told me." It takes the pressure off both of you.
Wanting to suggest something is not a fault. Watching someone you care about have a bad week, with nothing you can do, is hard. A suggestion gives your worry somewhere to go.
It may help to notice who the suggestion is for. Sometimes it is for them. Sometimes it is for the person who can't stand feeling useless.
Next time the words "have you tried" are on their way out, there is a shorter sentence available. "That sounds hard."