Advocating in Healthcare: Some Advice

As many of you are aware I have been a huge advocate of advocating for yourself when it comes to explaining your concerns and your experiences to me while you're in session with me so that I can better understand the context and the nature of the sensations you're feeling within your own body. This is not only an important tool during the #therapeutic process but I think it is a very important to exercise your ability to advocate for your own health. How many times have you heard nightmares of people saying I wish the doctors would've listen to me I wish they would've given me a test I needed to figure out the real problem but they said they wouldn't do that because my #insurance wouldn't cover it. The truth is healthcare belongs to you and the consequences are all yours not the insurance company and not even the healthcare provider the consequences of an action belong to the patient alone. Therefore, I think it is very important to not only exercise your voice to also exercise your veracity when people are choosing to stop actively listening to you and start pushing back on you that what you have to say is it important what they plan on doing or what they can do is good enough. With that being said we can always be polite and we can always practice patients. One of the most common frustrations is something that clients bring up quite often and that is if something requires a blood panel or some other very basic test many times medical providers will not tell you the exact name of the test nor will they allow you to pay for the test unless you're willing to pay for the entire appointment through insurance. The truth is that it almost all cases better off to go to a provider we have no prior relationship with and simply request a test rather than even mentioning that you have insurance you may not get the best rate or you also wanna have to deal with provider saying no. I believe it's always in peoples best interest to get the opinions of their trust and medical providers will always be ready to advocate to the point of saying as long as the test is not going to hurt me it's nothing wrong with taking a test and if the insurance doesn't wanna pay for it I should if it means that the medical providers I do have might get a step closer to ruling things out that could potentially hurt me in the future.