Listen to Your Body & Talk to Your Doctor: Learn to Understand What Your Doctor Says Disease * Diagnosis * Drugs

Our body is the most sophisticated, intelligent, and priceless machine on this planet that nature has granted us. Endowed with the natural instincts of survival, sustenance, and self-propagation through self-protection, self-preservation, and reproduction, it achieves all these objectives by talking to us all the time, both in the states of health and disease.

In the state of health, it tells us when water and glucose levels in the blood are low, through the sensations of thirst and hunger respectively, virtually forcing us to drink water and eat food. When tired and exhausted, it compels us to sleep. Even while sleeping, it tries to tell us if it needs food or water or safety in case of danger, through sensory perceptions or even through dreams indicative of these situations.

Likewise, in case of the emergence of any disease, it develops early symptoms of uneasiness, discomfort, fever, pain, swelling, rashes, faintness, loss of appetite, and loss of sleep. However, the full-blown disease that is identifiable to the doctors takes a longer time to evolve. Therefore, it is prudent that we carefully listen to the body and take necessary remedial action, particularly, timely consultation with a medical professional or doctor.

This booklet is aimed at establishing a good channel of communication between the medically educated, knowledgeable, skillful, and experienced medical professional or doctor who speaks a different medical language derived from Greek and Latin, and the common man or the patient, on the other side, who is differently educated by helping him understand medical jargon, and bringing about medical jagran, a Hindi word meaning ‘awakening’.

Dr. Ashok Kumar Batham, the author of this booklet, is a medical doctor with postgraduate qualifications in pharmacology and clinical research.

He possesses more than 40 years of cumulative experience of teaching in medical colleges, clinical research, and drugs regulatory affairs in leading pharmaceutical companies.

Dr. Batham has also been a chairman of an independent clinical research ethics committee responsible for taking care of the rights, safety, and well-being of human subjects participating in drug trials.

With his background as a medical academician and a translational medical scientist, he appreciated the significant difficulties in communication that exist between medical professionals and patients, and therefore, he decided to author this booklet titled, Listen to Your Body & Talk to Your Doctor.