Medical appointments...

     A medical appointment can be overwhelming. Typically, there's a some administrative work - like scheduling the appointment and adjusting work and life to accommodate, arranging payment through insurance and co-payments and sometimes filling out new patient forms. Once behind the desk, basic health info is gathered like weight, height, temperature, blood pressure, pulse and usually the physician's assistant who collects this info wants to chat about symptoms and understand the reason for the appointment. After all this, the patient finally meets with the medical professional.
     For me, meeting with the medical professional was generally a relief - like I had made it and everything will be just fine now - the medical professional will take care of me.
     But after several suboptimal appointments, ones where I had forgotten to ask something or I wasn't exactly clear on what was supposed to happen next, I had come to realize that I needed to participate in appointments more assertively and more consistently and I needed to objectively change how I was handling my appointments. I needed to set up some sort of plan... and here's what I came up with.

• Determine a purpose for the appointment based on symptoms, "I am here because I am experiencing <symptom X>.". This helped me and my medical professional start off in the right direction. And I try very much to keep this statement in plain English.
• Maintain a history or list of symptoms and treatments - like a timeline or schedule. Handing over a hard copy might be nice. Dr Lyme#3 actually required this as part of my initial new patient packet. I continue with a daily list of treatments and symptoms and we go over this information during my appointments. The timeline has helped me to understand what has happened and to identify trends, so I can recognize treatments that work better for me.
• Determine expected outcomes or decisions, "I expect answers to a list of questions, or a diagnosis regarding <symptom X>, or follow-on tests to help determine a diagnosis, or interpretation of test results, or a treatment plan, etc." Without this, I would tend to drift through the appointment.
• Determine expected next steps, "I expect a treatment plan, necessary prescriptions and a follow-up appointments, referrals for specialists, etc." On a related note, my medicine schedule got pretty complicated and it was easy to miss a detail even with the prescription handy - believe it or not, prescriptions are sometimes not very clear. So I would go through each treatment to understand what the remedy was called, how much I should take and when I should take it - and write all that down.
• Hold on to diagnostic test results, not just the interpretation. So often I would rely on my medical providers to manage the results or to just sum it up, but that became a problem when I started working with multiple medical providers who needed access to test results and when I wanted to research on my own. Tracking hard copies can be really difficult and time consuming, but fortunately nowadays most medical providers offer online services and HIPPA compliant disclosure to other medical providers, and sometimes medical providers share the same system so there's no need to schlep paperwork around - all of this helps a bunch.

     For me, I would write all this down as bullets in a document on my phone beforehand, so I could easily review it while in the waiting room and add feedback from my medical provider during the appointment. It might be better to have good ol' pen and paper - personal preference, perhaps.

     One last thing, I try very hard to avoid all those nice magazines and TVs in the waiting room - they are a total distraction. Instead, I try to focus on setting my frame of mind - that I need to contribute to the appointment - and reviewing my bullet points. Sounds boring, but it helps.