Building a partnership with your doctor: good doctor-patient communication
|

Building a partnership with your doctor: good doctor-patient communication

Doctor and patient communication should be a two-way street, not one. While your doctor has medical expertise and training in how to recognize and treat medical conditions, you are the expert on your body and your needs. As a patient, it’s your responsibility to gather good information about yourself and your history and symptoms, and…

Al’s diagnosis journey: how a broken hip led to diagnosis of a blood disorder
|

Al’s diagnosis journey: how a broken hip led to diagnosis of a blood disorder

This post is about why it’s so important to keep pushing doctors in order to find out just what the medical problem is, and how to solve it. The following is what Al and I went through(mainly from a medical perspective), and the lessons we learned from it. Despite mostly finding very good doctors, going…

Getting a second opinion: how, when, and why to do it!
|

Getting a second opinion: how, when, and why to do it!

If your condition is complicated, you will likely need to see a variety of experts.  Somewhere on that journey, a doctor, most often a specialist of some sort, will recognize your symptoms and give you a diagnosis.  Is that diagnosis enough?  Are you set now?  Or do you need to go deeper down the rabbit…