Held on Tuesday, 28 October 2025 at 6:30pm

Venue: Apothecaries' Hall, Black Friar's Lane, London EC4V 6EJ

Presenting Unheard: On medical silencing (Sydenham Lecture)

To be given by Dr Rageshri Dhairyawan

Sydenham lecture 2025

When Dr Rageshri Dhairyawan was admitted to hospital as a patient she didn’t receive the pain medication that she told them she needed, despite her being a senior doctor. It was in that moment she understood that something was deeply wrong with our healthcare system - medical silencing is pervasive and hindering patient safety and health equity.

In Unheard, Dr Dhairyawan takes us on a journey through history to show how silencing patients has been ingrained in medicine from its inception. Western medicine has been built on the assumption that power should always lie with the doctor, and that patients should be powerless to decisions made about their body if it is done to make them well. This, alongside the prejudices of society, has led to dramatic gaps in medical knowledge because for centuries people have not been heard. Dr Dhairyawan offers a way to reshape our health system for a future where active and engaged listening is the new frontier.

Dr Rageshri Dhairyawan is an NHS Consultant in Sexual Health and HIV Medicine at Barts Health NHS Trust and Deputy Director of the SHARE Collaborative, Queen Mary University of London. Her clinical work, research and advocacy focus on improving health equity, Rageshri has held numerous national charity and policy positions and regularly works with patient organisations. She was named as a ‘Woman Changing the World’ on International Women’s Day in 2019 by iNews. Rageshri is the author of Unheard: The Medical Practice of Silencing (Trapeze, 2024) and has contributed an essay to the anthology No One Talks About This Stuff (Unbound, 2024).