Communicating with Your Doctor: Rx for Good Medical Care

This is the first book written specifically to help patients talk to their doctors. Requiring no special background for understanding, it is designed to improve communication between patient and doctor, which, as the authors explain, is good for our health.

Combining hard data with Dr. Jones’ 10 years of experience in medicine, Jones and Phillips seek to enhance communication by clarifying the doctor/patient relationship. The result is a practical, step-by-step guide that features multiple checklists and specific instructions to help patients get the best possible medical care for their money.

This book tells how fees are set and deals with situations ranging from buying insurance to preparing for a hospital visit. But mostly it is about relationships, about doctors and patients; it shows how to ask questions, how to open lines of communication that will provide the knowledge and the ability to form realistic expectations concerning what a doctor can and cannot do.

J. Alfred Jones, M.D., practices internal medicine in State College, Pennsylvania.

Gerald M. Phillips, Professor of Speech Communication at the Pennsylvania State University, has written 27 books dealing with communication.