Preparing For Your First Functional Medicine

Hi, I’m Dr. Emily Parke. Today I’d like to talk to you about how to get the most out of your functional medicine visit. Whether it’s here or not with us at Arizona Wellness Medicine, there is some tips I’d like to share. The very first thing is to come prepared. Come prepared with note, and I would highly recommend writing down the most important questions that you want to make sure get answered during your visit so that you can make sure that you get those answered for sure. A lot of times during the visit a lot of information is being conveyed back and forth. It’s very easy to forget some of your most important questions and remember later, so you definitely want to take some time to prepare and write some questions down.

The second thing I would say is bring all of your medications and supplements with you, and bring the physical bottles with you because a lot of us will want to actually see details on what is actually in especially the supplements, because sometimes the devil’s in the detail with the proper nutrient forms and other additives that may be in there that we may or may not want you to be taking during your treatment plan. So, getting the actual bottles in front of us so we can see them is really important. I would also say if you have not already faxed over or uploaded your previous medical records or previous laboratory testing, that’s also really important because we definitely want to take into consideration testing and consultations that you’ve done before. At our practice, we do have a complete electronic patient portal and we love to see all of your previous records, especially in the last year. Anything that you might find pertinent.

We like to look at those before your visit because we do spend time preparing before every single visit that you come here for. So, we like to look at those records ahead of time. I would also say, obviously you’re going to make sure that you’ve filled out all of your forms and consents. That happens well before you come for your functional medicine visit, but really take that to heart. Make sure that you’re filling out all of the intake forms as best as you can, because he more information we have before your visit, the more productive of a visit we’re going to have. Also, take a really good look at the consents that we’re asking you to fill out too. There are consents on laboratory testing, on the practice policies, really important information that we want to make sure we convey to you as far as how we run the practice. Those would be my big tips on how to actually prepare for your first functional medicine visit. This is Dr. Emily Parke with your functional health minute for today.