A good relationship between a patient and a physician is crucial and could become a lifetime — and life-saving — connection.
Personally, I do something I like to call the HOPE Note when I see patients. This stands for Healing Oriented Practices and Environments Note. It is essentially a set of questions physicians can ask their patients that address the underlying determinants of their health. These questions can help discover which changes can be personalized and implemented in a patient’s current lifestyle.
A physician’s goal is to develop a collaborative relationship with their patient in order to achieve prevention and healing. In the video below, I demonstrate what questions physicians can ask patients in order to establish this important relationship.
For doctors looking to improve their relationship with their patients, I encourage them to use the HOPE Note as their guide. I also encourage patients to give a copy of my book, How Healing Works, to their physicians and ask them to do an integrative visit, using the HOPE Note.
HOPE Visit
The HOPE note is a patient-guided process designed to identify the patient’s values and goals in their life and for healing. Your role as the physician is to provide the evidence and support to help them meet those goals. The first step for a patient in this process is, naturally, the preparation and understanding the purpose and need for an integrative health first. Next is the actual visit.
Working through questions with the patient helps engage them in shared decision-making about their health and healing, putting them front and center in the care plan. Best of all, it brings out the patient’s own intuition about what they most need to heal and combines that with your knowledge of the evidence for what heals.
The goal is to reframe the patient/physician orientation from one of disease treatment to one that emphasizes health promotion and self-healing while integrating evidence-based complementary and lifestyle approaches into conventional medical care.
To explore all aspects of the HOPE note, including videos and downloadable resources, please visit our dedicated page, here. Both providers and patients, alike, can benefit from this patient-guided process so be sure take advantage of the HOPE note and use it to achieve whole-person health.
Your Health Into Your Own Hands
Drawing on 40 years of research and patient care, Dr. Wayne Jonas explains how 80 percent of healing occurs organically and how to activate the healing process.