From Function to Meaning: Listening Further 

In recent years, medicine has begun to recognise symptoms that cannot be explained by any visible abnormality. These are often described as functional – real experiences for which tests show no damage or disease.

At the same time, there is growing understanding of how trauma and emotional shock can shape the body’s responses long after the event – influencing pain, digestion, immunity, and fatigue. This trauma-aware approach has allowed many patients to be understood, not dismissed.

Attentive medicine shares this awareness – but listens even further. It does not stop at asking what happened to cause the symptom, but why the body chose this form of expression, in this person, at this moment in life.

It recognises that symptoms may not only reveal an adaptation to stress, but also a form of communication – a language through which the body invites us to see what has been forgotten or denied.

Where other approaches may end with explanation or regulation, attentive medicine begins with relationship: between body, story, and meaning.