Prepared Patient: Talking About Symptoms With Your Health Care Team

What brings you in here today?

It’s a simple question that’s at the heart of many patient-doctor conversations, but it’s not a question to take lightly. Discussing your symptoms with a doctor, nurse, nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant can be one of the most important tasks you perform as a patient, putting you on the right road to treatment and recovery or sending you down a blind alley of confusion and misdiagnosis.

What to Say - and How to Say It

As a family doctor, Carol “Vicki” Koenig knows what she wants to hear from her patients. “It is their symptoms —what the patient feels, what makes it better or worse, what’s worked before and what hasn’t,” said the retired physician from Exmore, Va.

During Patrina Reddick’s chemotherapy for breast cancer, she recalls, her son would write down how many times a day she vomited or experienced other side effects. “This was an awful time, but I had to find a way to tell them how I was feeling each day,” she says.

Reddick, a counselor and mentor from Charlotte, N.C., felt that her recovery depended on an honest and detailed conversation with her doctors. “Without a patient finding a way to communicate effectively what his or her body is trying to say,” she noted, “the doctors cannot use the skills they’ve acquired.”

Her candid talks helped her build a relationship with her health care team, she says, and “made the team understand that cancer was affecting my whole family, not just me.”

Your symptoms are what you know. When you describe them to your clinician, that’s the time when she or he is learning from you. Here are a few tips on what to say when describing your symptoms and sharing your personal health knowledge:

• Give your health care providers a basic description of your problem—one to two sentences should do it
• Tell them when you experience the symptoms and how often they occur
• Let them know if anything makes the symptoms better or worse
• Tell them if you have ever experienced the symptoms before, and under what circumstances
• Tell them if anyone else in your family or workplace is experiencing the same symptoms.

These questions can help the doctor sort out with you whether your symptoms relate to a new condition, an old medical problem, or a side effect of your medications. Although we think of symptoms as “problems,” some symptoms can be good news, signaling an improvement in the way you feel or a sign that your current treatment is working.

How you describe your symptoms can be just as important as what you describe. Most physicians—and experienced patients—urge you to be as detailed and descriptive as possible, to help zero in on a diagnosis and track the progress of your care