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Wise Minds, New Tools
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Stop 6 of 13

Get ready for a doctor’s appointment

You will walk into your next appointment with a written list of the right questions, and you will know where the line sits between preparing and diagnosing.

This is for preparing, never for diagnosing. Walk in with your questions written down. Every doctor I have met prefers it that way.

Do this

  1. Tell it the situation in plain words, without your name or anything that identifies you. I am seeing a cardiologist next week about an irregular heartbeat. I am in my seventies and I take a blood pressure tablet.
  2. Ask: What questions should I be asking at this appointment? Read the list it gives you.
  3. Cut it down. Ten questions is a list nobody gets through. Ask for the five that matter most, or pick them yourself.
  4. Add your own worry, the one you might not say out loud in the room. Ask it to help you word that question.
  5. Print the list, or write it on paper. Take it with you.

Watch it done first, if you would rather

Let my human assistant John show you what that looks like. He does the same thing you are about to do, at the same speed, with nothing edited out.

Filming This one is not recorded yet. Everything you need is written out above, and the video will appear here when it is ready.

What just happened

What you just did was preparation, and an assistant is genuinely good at it. It has read a great deal of medical writing, so it knows the shape of a good question about an irregular heartbeat.

What it did not do, and must not do, is tell you what is wrong with you. It has not examined you, it does not have your history, and as you saw at stop 1 it will state a wrong thing as confidently as a right one. On a bill that is annoying. On a diagnosis it is dangerous.

The useful way to hold it: this is the tool that helps you make better use of the fifteen minutes you get with a doctor. It is not the doctor, and it is not a second opinion.

One more thing worth doing after the appointment. Come home, tell it what you were told, and ask it to explain the parts you did not follow. That is the same job as stop 5, applied to speech.

If something did not go as expected

It refused to answer anything medical.
Some are cautious. Rephrase it as preparation rather than diagnosis: help me prepare questions for my doctor about... rather than what is wrong with me?
It gave me something alarming to worry about.
That is the tool listing possibilities, not making a judgment about you. Take the question to your appointment. Do not take the answer home.
Should I type my medical history in?
Not your name, address, date of birth or insurance numbers. Symptoms and medications in general terms are fine and make the questions better. More on where that line sits at stop 10.

The view from here: The line between preparing and diagnosing