{"id":22379,"date":"2022-08-23T14:38:07","date_gmt":"2022-08-23T18:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/participatorymedicine.org\/epatients\/?p=22379"},"modified":"2022-08-23T14:38:07","modified_gmt":"2022-08-23T18:38:07","slug":"the-keys-to-good-relationships-with-your-care-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/participatorymedicine.org\/epatients\/2022\/08\/the-keys-to-good-relationships-with-your-care-teams.html","title":{"rendered":"The Keys to Good Relationships With Your Care Teams"},"content":{"rendered":"

Being born with cystic fibrosis, a progressive, genetic lung disease, I have had countless health encounters throughout my life. Through these experiences I have learned the power that lies in self advocating for my health in the clinic setting with my doctors and care teams and my passion is to empower other patients to be active participants in their care too.<\/p>\n

Over the last few years have found the value and importance of self-advocacy and started lending my voice as a patient perspective in research serving on various committees with the CF Foundation and serving on advisory boards and in consultant roles with pharmaceutical and healthcare companies developing patient facing lay language materials to support health literacy, reviewing clinical trial protocol designs, and overall helping industry to consider the patient experience throughout their drug development.<\/p>\n

I was recently on a podcast sharing an example of a negative experience I had with my doctor and it made me think about trust between patients and their doctors, and how vital communication is. Bad experiences with doctors can contribute to the overall opinion someone has of the healthcare system and lead to poorer health outcomes for people.<\/p>\n

During one of our first encounters, as I had just transitioned from pediatric to adult care, my adult CF doctor made assumptions about my treatment adherence and responsibility to my care without understanding the scope of my health history and asking me questions. I felt offended, misunderstood, and dismissed at the time. Luckily our relationship was mended in time, and we now have a very strong patient-to-doctor relationship, but the premise was a lack of clear communication, transparency, and asking questions to understand the full scope of the situation and gather background.<\/p>\n

When negative interactions occur between a doctor and patient, patients are far less likely to trust their doctors\u2019 options about their health regimen, leading to potentially less frequent checkups and worse health outcomes. Based on my experiences as a patient advocate in the clinical trial space, patients are also less likely to find out about and enroll in clinical trials, due to less frequent follow up and reduced trust in doctor\u2019s encouragement of participating.<\/p>\n

Changing an already established bad relationship to a good one can be challenging, but there are ways to effectively communicate to try to keep patient doctor relationships positive and supportive, if at least amicable.\u00a0Treat your doctor as an ally, not an adversary.<\/p>\n