No, the actual issue here is that people don’t understand that they need to have enough empathy to be able to follow a logical sequence of steps before speaking:
First, realize that the person with the chronic health issue has probably put a lot more time and effort into addressing the complexity of their experience.
Second, realize it is in fact exhausting to constantly get unsolicited advice.
Third, realize you presumably are not the only person this person with a chronic health issue interacts with and that most people do not take special care to avoid giving unsolicited advice.
Fourth, realize this means you should assume that this person is getting a lot of unsolicited advice.
Stop for a moment before speaking at this point. Ask yourself, is your additional one iota of advice is highly likely to be both completely novel to this person and efficacious for their issue? Your advice is unlikely to be both those things simultaneously but instead forces this person’s focus back on an issue they are likely trying to avoid thinking about.
Okay, given all that, I am not saying “don’t ever give advice”. All I would request of people is that most of the time, ask first. If your advice is critical, novel, and highly likely to succeed, perhaps intervene immediately. But otherwise, the person will appreciate this opportunity to decide whether or not to interact with input regarding their chronic issue, it’s very unusual that anyone takes care to consider how it feels emotionally to be constantly the person who needs to be told how to live.
Imagine you were telling someone what you had for lunch. You had a sandwich. They ask what toppings you had. You say you had these particular toppings. The person then says “you should try next time adding this other topping, that would have made your sandwich better and in fact would greatly improve the quality of your life”. Unfortunately, you’re allergic to this additional topping, which you dutifully inform the other participant in the conversation.
Okay, that’s fine. Maybe it would have made the sandwich better in their opinion, and sometimes that kind of stuff is okay to let go. But now imagine this conversation happening with multiple people every lunch every day for the rest of your life. Pretty soon you’d start wondering why the fuck all these people have such strong opinions about your lunch. You would also notice that none of these people ate any sandwiches with the topping they insisted would improve your life so much.
I have a chronic health condition that is better managed now, but at one point caused debilitating pain. I stopped talking about it and tried to avoid giving any indication I was unwell at all outside of intimate social settings, because the sheer volume of unsolicited input I got about how the right way to deal with the fact that a surgeon shredded the nerves in my abdomen was to take ginger and rub lavender essential oils on it, or just use CBD, or have you tried hopping up and down on your left foot on a Tuesday immediately following the vernal equinox...