Working With Your Doctor: Getting the Healthcare Y

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Working With Your Doctor: Getting the Healthcare Y Getting the Healthcare You Deserve

By Nancy Keene
First Edition July 1998
Pages: 377
ISBN 10: 1-56592-273-5 | ISBN 13: 9781565922730

Book description

Working with Your Doctor shows how to form a satisfying partnership with your doctor in a rapidly changing healthcare environment. It contains in-depth and practical information on how to find the right doctor, communicate clearly, ask about tests and treatments, seek opinions, take action when wronged, and deal effectively with managed care. This book is a great primer for patient empowerment.
Full Description

Getting the best healthcare in today's world requires that you participate in the process. Working with Your Doctor: Getting the Healthcare You Deserve will help you to be your own advocate, to get the very vest in healthcare, and to have the best possible relationship with your doctors. It will show you how to become an assertive, but understanding, medical care consumer. Medical treatments are more complex than ever, and there are almost always options, especially for chronic conditions. You often receive care from several doctors, either because you have conditions that require specialists or because you receive treatment through a group practice or HMO. This book contains stories from both doctors and patients -- medical "frequent fliers," who share, in their own words, the lessons and strategies they have learned in their medical journeys. These first-hand accounts are a reminder that with the right tools we can maneuver through the often complicated maze of medical information and get the best care available. We don't waste any energy railing against "the system" or demonizing doctors. Instead, we give you in-depth, practical information on:

Finding the right doctor
Communication and mutual decision-making
Rights and responsibilities of the physician and patient
Problem solving and handling conflict
Questions to ask about tests, drugs, and surgery
Researching medical literature and talking with your doctor about what you find
Options for taking action if you've been wronged

Being well informed can protect you against mistakes or bad care. Working with Your Doctor: Getting the Healthcare You Deserve guides you through the medical care environment and is an education for even the most savvy healthcare consumer.

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Media reviews "Working with Your Doctor fills a genuine need for patients and their family members caught up in this new and intimidating age of impersonal, economically-driven health care delivery. The author systematically and meticulously covers all the bases from how to prudently select and subsequently interact with physicians to dealing effectively with tests, grievances, hospitals and insurance carriers. Upon finishing this eminently readable book, the only questions left unanswered is why [Nancy Keene] didn't give it to us sooner. Had she done so, I would have suggested it as a 'must reading' for my medical students and residents. In my opinion, it says more about the 'art of medicine' than anything since Sir William Osler's classic on the subject. Patients and doctors alike owe Nancy Keene a large debt of gratitude." --James Dougherty, M.D., Emeritus Professor of Surgery, Albany Medical College

"Working with Your Doctor is excellent. I read nearly all the 'how to' books about medicine that I see, and I am generally disappointed. They are usually too simplistic, too unrealistic, or too mechanical. The essence of medicine and the experience of healing is in relationships -- the primary relationship being the doctor, with whom we must trust not only our life, but our heart and soul. We are more than machines to be serviced by competent mechanics. This book captures the critical human dimension -- not only of patients, using their own stories and voices, but also bringing in the human dimension of physicians as well. The model of partnership emphasizes that the relationship is not something that occurs just because someone picks a doctor off of an HMO list and sees him or her for a few five-minute visits. A partnership is a relationship in evolution over time and experience with one another. Working with Your Doctor captures all of that...very impressively." --Dr. Linda Peeno, Chair of Ethics Committee, University of Louisville Hospital

"I am a heavy user of the medical system and I found Working with Your Doctor to be a welcome source of information. It helps readers approach the medical system as educated consumers and to consider practitioners of medicine as sometimes fallible human beings. It gives many excellent ideas on how to achieve a good partnership with doctors. I plan to send a copy of the book to my mother, my sister, my brother, and my best friend." --Patty Feist, Administrator, PED-ALL; editor, Ped Onc Resource Center http://www.acor.org/diseases/ped-onc/

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