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Your Follow-Through With Treatment: The Key to Your Success
Our healthcare team is dedicated to providing you with skilled assessment and treatment to address your current problems and long-term heath goals. Your participation is the key to achieving better health.
We will discuss and decide with you a series of steps, which may include physical and laboratory tests, lifestyle changes and other action items, the use of nutritional supplements and other remedies, and a variety of treatments from various practitioners. But your health improvement program can only succeed with your own active participation and committed follow-through. There will be many steps in your program that only you can do, and that taking those steps will be a key to your progress.
We will provide you with information and support to help you to play this active role, realizing that ultimately there is no substitute for your attitude of self-responsibility. We look forward to working in partnership with you, to guide and empower you to reap the rewards of achieving your health goals.
Tracking progress and Monitoring Symptoms
Monitoring your own symptoms and tracking signs of your health status are among the most effective ways that you can actively contribute to the success of your health program.
Through your own careful observation, you can provide our office with indispensable information and clues about the nature of your health problems. Self-monitoring can point to the various factors that may trigger, accompany, worsen or alleviate a particular condition. It can also provide you with important guides for taking care of yourself.
Based on your particular health needs, we may suggest that you monitor and record certain selected symptom patterns, such as pain, stiffness, fatigue, palpitations, wheezing, shortness of breath, itching, gastrointestinal distress, bowel function, urinary function, menstruation, sleep, dizziness, mood, etc. For a given symptom, it will be helpful for you to note such details as the intensity, quality, and timing, as well as the association with other related events. In some cases, you may be monitoring a discrete health indicator, like weight or blood pressure.
We may ask that you keep a written log of this information to be reviewed at follow-up clinic visits. In that case we will provide you with the forms to help you get started in keeping your personal health diary. If you are communicating with us via the Internet, your health tracking information can be conveniently recorded and accessed through your secure account.
The information from your self-monitoring will be combined with the ongoing assessments from your office and clinical testing. Together, this data will indicate whether your therapies and lifestyle changes are having the intended effect, and whether further changes in your health program are needed.
Most of our patients discover that tracking the progress of their health improvement is very motivating, and it greatly reinforces their excitement and enthusiasm for continuing the journey toward optimal health.
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