Overview
After you learn that you have an illness or disease, you will probably be in contact with health care providers more often than most people. Considering how serious your illness or disease is, your health care providers will be some of the most important people you’ll ever talk with. Talking with your health care providers and being more active about your health care can go a long way toward helping you feel in charge of your own life.
A good starting point for communicating better is to realize that a large part of staying healthy depends on you. Here’s some of what this can mean:
- Learn as much as you can about your illness and/or disease and the treatments for it.
- Be honest about your own needs and about what’s going on in your life.
- Realize that your doctor and other health care providers also want your treatment to work well for you.
- Be careful to be on time for appointments.
Thinking of your relationships with your health care providers as a partnership will let you get the most benefit from your treatment. Here’s how the partnership works: You have problems that health care providers are trained to take care of. On the other hand, they offer services that you need. So, you and your health care providers both bring something to your visits. And both of you can benefit from those visits if you agree that you are partners and that you need to communicate to make the partnership work.
Remember—you can’t communicate without talking. So, don’t be afraid to talk with any of your providers about whatever your concerns or questions may be.
This section of COMET will show you some of the things you can do to make sure that you and your doctor and other providers communicate with each other as clearly as possible.