Happy New Year! As 2012 makes its way into our lives, I have some resolutions for empowered patients that might not be what you expect. I'll leave it to others to suggest the losing-weight-quitting-smoking-eating-less-red-meat resolutions. Instead, my suggestions will make you smarter and will improve your ability to make the right choices for yourself.
1. If you don't already have one, find a primary care doctor.
If you don't have a relationship with a primary care doctor by the end of 2012, then you may never find one. The perfect storm of reasons why primary care doctors will be so difficult to find will come to head beginning in 2013. If you don't have a primary care doctor, find one right away. If you have one, but you aren't comfortable with the relationship, now is the time to change doctors. If you have one, but you haven't visited in more than six months, then make an appointment for a physical or a flu shot, or for some other reason. (Patients who don't visit their primary care doctors more than once or twice a year may find themselves dropped from the doctor's patient roster.)
• The Shortage of Primary Care Doctors
• How to Decide Whether to Change Doctors
2. Don't believe medical headlines.
Print (newspapers, magazines) and online headline writers have one job - that is, to suck you into an article or story, make you read it, and force you to spend your time reading the article so that - ta da! - you'll spend your time looking at their advertising, too. Yes, it's another follow-the-money reason why we have to be particularly careful that we are getting the right information - and that information is NOT going to come from headlines.
(See today's post title? I could have called it "New Year Resolutions for Empowered Patients" - Dull! Boring! You would have passed it by.... thus, my point.)
You'll be educating yourself far more accurately by reading the articles attached to those headlines, then analyzing those articles, too. Between conflicts-of-interest and bad conclusions, medical research, and the headlines that announce it, just aren't all they are cracked up to be.
3. Don't believe - or forward - political email notices.
This year's political campaigns will be among the most negative, bogus, hateful and just plain dishonest we've ever witnessed. I guarantee you will receive more email forwards from your "friends" that address what this candidate said or that candidate claimed, or what has been dredged up from someone's past - or whatever horrible claims can be made....
Many of them will relate to healthcare or the Affordable Care Act. And most of them with either be out-and-out lies, or they will be a shaded and negative versions of the truth. A typical email will contain many claims and one part of one of them will be truthful.
Your best bet is not to be sucked in by all that misinformation and disinformation.
And whatever you do, don't forward it to anyone else! I believe that those who write those deceptive emails originally are trying to turn you into a fool. And if you forward that email to someone else, not only have you have fallen victim to their deception, but further, you are being just as deceptive, trying to make fools of your friends, too.
You have the opportunity to stop the madness. Not only can you analyze the veracity of those email forwards, but you can share them here at Patient Empowerment so others can see how ridiculous and wrong they are, too.
• How to Confirm or Debunk Claims Made in Email, Blogs or Social Media
• Share Your Experience: Confirming or Debunking Email Claims
As I said - not your Momma's resolutions. But I do believe you have a better chance of keeping them than trying to lose weight, quit smoking or changing any other life-long habit!
All the best to you, and yours, in 2012.
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