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No detail is too small to share with your ob-gyn. You trust your doctor and feel satisfied with your health care experience. You are comfortable with your health care decisions. You and your doctor talk about any barriers to your care, such as financial difficulties or lack of transportation. Your doctor encourages you to ask questions. You feel you fully understand all the options available to you. You might get resources you can read, apps you can use, or videos you can watch to learn more. Your doctor gives you information that is easy to understand. Your doctor asks about your values (what is most important to you about the decision to be made), your preferences, and your past experiences. Your doctor begins each visit with open-ended questions about your priorities, such as “What brings you in today,” and then listens to your concerns.

So how do you know when shared decision making is happening? It might look like this: It’s valuable input for the conversation we’re about to have. When I ask about family, career, hobbies, and social life, it’s more than just chitchat. Setting the ToneĪs an ob-gyn, it’s my role to establish a relationship with my patient at each visit. Together, we decided birth control pills are a good choice based on her current goals, routines, and lifestyle. She told me she wasn’t happy with the IUD (intrauterine device) she had before. Are you trying to prevent pregnancy? Are you trying to manage menstrual bleeding? Do you mind thinking about your birth control every day? Variables like these make choosing birth control a classic area for shared decision making.Ĭircling back to Valerie: Her demanding schedule leaves little room for the unexpected, such as irregular periods. Do you wish to get pregnant one day? Are you wary of major surgery? If yes, medication might be a good place to start.īirth control: Each form of birth control comes with its own benefits, risks, level of effectiveness, and side effects. We’ll also talk about your values and preferences. Deciding starts with knowing how bothersome the symptoms are for you, and discussing which treatments typically have the least risk and the greatest benefit. We recommend starting mammograms no later than 50 if you don’t start in your 40s.Ībnormal bleeding: We can treat abnormal vaginal bleeding with medication or surgery. So that may be one reason to decide to delay mammograms until you are closer to 50, as long as you are not at increased risk of breast cancer and have no symptoms. This causes a lot of undue anxiety for some women. Women in their 40s are more likely to have false-positives-that is, mammograms showing possible signs of cancer when there really is none. But the benefits and risks are not the same for all patients. Mammograms: For women with an average risk of breast cancer, we used to always recommend beginning mammogram screenings at age 40.

Shared decision making can apply to any aspect of women’s health care, but it’s most useful when there are two or more paths to consider. When these perspectives meet, you and your doctor can weigh everything together to help you make the best decision possible.

You are the expert on what you want from your health care-why you’re sitting in that office right now. You know your culture, your family dynamics, and what’s going on in your life. They also draw on their experience with treating past patients.īut as the patient, you have valuable information too. Your ob-gyn comes to the table with deep knowledge of women’s health care and the science behind medical recommendations. It’s easy to understand the ob-gyn’s role in the doctor-patient relationship.