I don’t mean just your name, but do they know exactly what has been going on in your ‘medical’ life since they last saw you ? Every appointment that you have (three to six months ?), they have several hundred other patients between your visits, all with different problems, and all changing their conditions and problems between these widely spaced visits. I don’t think they really remember in detail what is going on, since they first saw you, in precise adequate detail to do the very best for each patient.
Another example is your yearly physical (if you happen to have a yearly physical) – does your doctor do much more than the regular check and look at last year’s results unless you have a real medical problem they are regularly dealing with ? Usually that’s all they do, but they don’t look back to see how this is related to the last 10+ years which would show trends for future potential medical issues.
I never realized this until I ‘got’ this long term disease – PMR – all the other things I previously ‘got’ were kinda’ quickies, one shot issues, in relation to the years of medical need for PMR.
I honestly think that if I had not been lucky enough to have discovered and be ‘trained’ by “Patient” and all the great Forum brains, I would not have had the necessary knowledge and multi-person information to deal with PMR and get myself down to the drug (pred) level that I’m at by just going to my medical professionals.
An example that we all know, from the lack of patient information, is the high speed taper that many doctors/rheumatologists propose, because they seem to think that they had better ‘cure’ you right away or you will think they are not competent. So flare after flare is so common due to this attitude, and they often don’t record these in detail, until somehow the very slow taper is identified to be necessary, and how slow should it be ? – and I think that this determination is often via the patient’s information and not the doctor’s research into the patient’s records of the previous 2-3 years. Maybe I’m being a bit ‘tough’ on the docs but I think this is a common discussion point.
Anyway, what I do is to make my own medical history for each doctor in the form of a chart and give them a copy each time I go for an appointment to show what has been happening since I last saw them. It is very beneficial for PMR due to the changes that occur between medication dosage, blood test results and how I am actually feeling on a day to day basis – ache and pain wise.
My rheumatologist really likes it and finds it so much easier to make decisions and potential future medication plans and wants the format to be able use it for other patients that she has to allow her to really understand what has been happening throughout their consultation periods.
Likewise, a couple of other doctors that I go to, my urologist and GP, want the similar charts for the histories I make for the issues that they are dealing with.
Regardless of the way you keep your medical history, I think that it is very beneficial when going to a doctor appointment to have detailed information of your history that shows on one page or so what is going on in your medical life for the reason you are seeing them (including exactly how you have been feeling between appointments) and not to rely on your doctor reading back though years of thick paper files (in some cases electronic these days of computers) – which I’m sure they do not have time to do for each patient.
If anyone wants to see what I do for my PMR chart, send me a personal message and I’ll forward an example to you.
Dave