Your visit to a doctor – the doctor consultation

Most doctors offer ten minute routine appointment times. During the appointment, your doctor will check your history, inspect you, discuss the possible causes of the symptoms with you, discuss the treatments options, possibly give you a prescription, arrange tests or referrals, and discuss any kind of follow-up that may require. As you can see, this is a lot to cover in ten minutes and this is just the problem to be rectified.

Things to consider before seeing a doctor:

What do I want to get from my visit to the doctor?

Do I need a diagnosis, a reassurance, a medication, a test, a sick note, or is it a follow-up visit for an ongoing problem?

Sometimes the doctor has asked to see you, in which case it is likely to be for a drug review or for the follow-up of a current disease.

Your medical History

Every visit to the doctor begins with you by giving your history or story. This is a very important part of the consultation, as the doctor will diagnose you on the basis of your history in about 60% of the cases. It's a good idea to spend a few minutes before seeing the doctor thinking about your history. Good use of the time in the waiting room before you being called in to see the doctor.

Some useful things that doctor will want to know are:

For each symptom, some other details are very useful.

•         How long does the problem going on?

•         Is it there all the time, does it come and go?

•         If it is irregular, can you describe how often it arrives on and lasts for?

For each symptom, other details are very useful. For example:

Pains:

•         Where is the pain?

•         Does it go somewhere else? For example, if you have a pain in your back, does it also take off your leg?

•         For a problem that comes and goes, a record held in a diary can be very useful to refer to, for example, headaches.

•         Does something makes the pain better or worse for e.g. movement, eating, deep breathing etc?

•         Are there other symptoms at the same time as pain?

Chest Symptoms:

Breathing: Do you have wheezing or shortness of breath? What kind of exercise makes it come from, or is it present when resting? For example: on hills, going upstairs or lying in bed.

A cough: Dry and hacking or chesty and wet (this means that it is probably producing phlegm or sputum). If so, what colour is it and how much are you producing every day?

Psychological or Mental Health problems:

These usually take longer and you may want to make a double appointment to see the doctor.

General symptoms:

If you are going through weight loss for no reason or having night sweats, these are important symptoms, so be sure to tell the doctor.

For any symptom, your doctor will ask you for more questions to clarify your story. When your doctor has taken your history, he can examine it depending on the problem.

Sometimes patients think that because they only come to the surgery, the doctor is able to give them extra time. Unfortunately, this is not the case, as this would mean that every patient who came afterwards would have their appointment delayed and during a two-hour procedure, this could lead to long delays.

About Us

Mediklik is an online doctor consultation service, which is not only providing health advice for people but also provides remote monitoring to patients and help them get quality treatment with their cutting-edge tools such as Free PHR, Healthline, diagnostic tool and complete information on diseases, drugs and first-Aids.

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