Communicate With Your Doctors

For many people, a diagnosis and its accompanying list of medications or recommended lifestyle changes can be confusing and hard to remember. Effectively communicating with your doctor and the sometimes myriad of other people involved in your health care is an essential part of understanding your condition and how to successfully manage it. These resources will help you ask the right questions and accurately keep track of the answers.

Preparing for your office visit

Being a prepared patient begins before you ever enter a doctor's office. Before your next appointment, get ready by checking out these useful guides.

The Rhode Island Health Literacy Project has a "Checkup Checklist" that lists what to bring to and from an appointment.
http://www.rihlp.org/pubs/checkup_checklist_astrazeneca.pdf

The Center for Advancing Health has created a short informative pamphlet as a model for the type of useful information that should be provided to patients and caregivers by clinics and doctors' offices. If your medical practice doesn't offer such a guide, you can use this guide to know what to ask for before you set up an appointment or to create a guide or reference sheet for yourself.
http://www.cfah.org/pdfs/CFAH_PACT_Guide_current.pdf

Dr. Susan Wang created a YouTube video, "How to Prepare for Your Doctor's Visit." This quick video describes how to get the most out of your doctor visit including what to bring and how to mentally prepare before you arrive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNKmtNkXz2I

The University of Minnesota has an article about communicating effectively with your doctor.
http://takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/navigate-healthcare-system/how-can-i-communicate-effectively

This Prepared Patient feature article may also be of use to you:
Effective Patienthood Begins With Good Communication:
http://www.cfah.org/hbns/preparedpatient/Prepared-Patient-Vol1-Issue3.cfm

Tracking your medications

Another important part of being a prepared patient involves understanding prescribed medications. This requires knowing what drugs you're taking, why you're taking them and when to take them.

AARP: Drugs A-Z is an online search database which provides information about what each drug is commonly used to treat, drug interactions, side effects and other information.
http://healthtools.aarp.org/drug-directory

Advanced Drug Safety is an online tool to "help you identify, diagnose and resolve drug interactions and combined side effect risks," according to its creator, PharmaSurveyor.
http://www.healthvault.com/websites/PharmaSURVEYOR-PharmaSURVEYOR.html

Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ) offers a printable wallet-size prescriptions card for you to take with you to your doctor or pharmacist. The form includes information like the medicine name, color, your dosage, what it's for and what not to take with the medicine.
http://www.ahrq.gov/consumer/safemeds/walletform.htm

My Medication Tracker produced by Consumer Reports Health.org is free software that you can download onto your computer to assist with keeping track of your mediations. Information you enter is kept private and stored only on your desktop.
http://www.consumerreports.org/health/medication-tracker/index.htm

MyMedSchedule is free and allows you to manage your meds online, set up text message reminders and print checklists.
http://www.mymedschedule.com

RememberItNow helps people get organized and remember to take their medicines. Some services are free, and others involve monthly fees.
www.rememberitnow.com

There are also "Intelligent" pill bottles that use lights and sounds to remind you to take your pills, from RxVitality.
http://www.rxvitality.com

Discussing symptoms and medical history

There are also tools available online that can help you decide what symptoms warrant a call to your doctor. If your symptoms are chronic but not urgent, these tools will remind you to address them during your next medical appointment:

WebMD provides information, supportive communities, and in-depth reference material about health topics from board-certified physicians, journalists, and community moderators. The "SymptomChecker" allows one to select parts of the body where you are experiencing symptoms for information about possible conditions. This site also provides questions pertinent to specific illnesses that one can ask at your doctor visit.
http://symptoms.webmd.com/

WikiHow: "How to Describe Medical Symptoms to Your Doctor" is useful if you're struggling to help your doctor understand what's troubling you. This article provides a checklist that can assist you in describing your medical symptoms.
http://www.wikihow.com/Describe-Medical-Symptoms-to-Your-Doctor

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, "Surgeon General's Family Health History Initiative" encourages families to learn more about their family health history since research has revealed that common and sometimes dangerous medical conditions run in families. This tool is useful to create a portrait of your family's health to share with your doctor to help determine if your genetics put you at risk for certain conditions.
http://www.hhs.gov/familyhistory/

Two of our Prepared Patient feature articles may also be of use to you:
Talking About Symptoms With Your Health Care Team:
http://www.cfah.org/hbns/preparedpatient/Vol3/Prepared-Patient-Vol3-Issue8.cfm
Side Effects: When Silence Isn't Golden:
http://www.cfah.org/hbns/preparedpatient/Vol4/Prepared-Patient-Vol4-Issue2.cfm

Asking your doctor questions

Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ) has put together a video with Dr. Carolyn Clancy about how to ask questions when you visit a clinician. AHRQ also has a website to build your own question list.
http://www.ahrq.gov/video/healthcolumns/questions/questions.htm
http://www.ahrq.gov/questionsaretheanswer/questionBuilder.aspx

The American Cancer Society knows it's important that you and your doctor are able to communicate well so you can get what you need. They provide tips that can help make it easier to talk with your doctor and other members of your health care team.
http://www.cancer.org/Treatment/UnderstandingYourDiagnosis/TalkingaboutCancer/TalkingWithYourDoctor/index

Geisinger Medical Center has a list of patient rights and responsibilities because being a good patient does not mean being a silent one.
http://www.geisinger.org/patients/pt_rights_resps.html

MedicineNet.com, which is owned and operated by WebMD, provides medical information for consumers. This article has sample questions to ask your doctor during a visit.
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=13683

Updated August 25, 2011