ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the understanding of health care professionals when meeting a patient with complex symptoms and diseases. Migrant patients experience barriers within health care that reduce their access to and outcome of standard care, ranging from too complex written communication to use of low-quality interpreters and lack of clinical cultural competencies among health care workers. The types of barriers include professional misinterpretation of symptoms, overlooking symptoms, lack of specialized culturally competent clinical teams, and complex compliance issues. Lack of respect for language barriers, health literacy, and functional illiteracy are key drivers of inequity. Medical doctors and their patients would benefit from dropping anxiety about discussing or asking about sensitive issues, guessing, and engage into trustworthy conversations. If complex patients are not offered an opportunity to describe and discuss their illness and symptom perceptions, the symptoms will become ruminating and linked to high levels of anxiety provoking diffuse sensations that medical doctors fail to understand.
