Ever go to a doctor or care provider and kind of slog through the appointment, nodding politely even when you didn’t understand a word being said to you? Or maybe stop by the pharmacy and hand over a prescription you couldn’t read for a medication you couldn’t name? Or how about after a visit to the emergency room or outpatient surgery and having to “guess” what your take-home instructions mean?
How hard can changing a bandage really be? Turns out to be harder than we thought, and with some bad consequences if things go wrong. And things can go very wrong like when you and your doctor have a communication breakdown and your illness does not get diagnosed correctly. Or when your medicines don’t mix and then become toxic.
If the point is to have the best possible health and health care you can get – and it is – then you have to become a better patient. You have to get off the sidelines and become full-fledged members of your health care team. And sometimes you have to become the team leader. You have to ask questions, speak up for yourselves, get information and become educated consumers.
When you take charge of your health and health care, like we have, everything changes. Now, we actually feel better about going to the doctor, asking a pharmacist questions, having a nurse go over care instructions with us so we can understand them, and so on.
We founded Say Ah! so you too can learn how to become a better patient. We hope you will use the Say Ah!’s website to get the most out of your health and health care. Say Ah! is dedicated to helping you understand health and medical information, and to improving communication between you and your health care providers. You can do it! We know because we did.
– Anna J. Allen and Helene Eisman Fisher
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