Bring this into any appointment — dermatology, functional medicine, naturopathy, acupuncture, or anything else being proposed for your skin. These are the questions it took me three separate conditions and more appointments than I can count to learn to ask on purpose, instead of by accident. Check them off as you go, or scan them the morning of — however it gets them in front of you before you’re back in the waiting room.
0 of 18 checked
About the treatment itself
What’s causing this in the first place, as far as you actually know?
What exactly does this do, and why is it expected to work for my specific situation?
In the event any tests are being run, what is it testing for, and what information will the results give us?
Are there other options you’d recommend, and why is this particular treatment being proposed over those?
What are the known side effects — common and rare-but-serious?
Is this expected to resolve the underlying cause, or manage the symptom while I use it?
What’s the typical length of time this prescription (oral or topical) is prescribed for — and at what point should staying on it longer than that become a concern? (A two-week course is a very different thing than staying on a prescription for an extended period of time.)
About time and expectation
How many weeks or months before I should expect a change?
Is a worsening period before improvement normal? How would I tell “expected” apart from “something is wrong”?
Realistically, how long does the full course of treatment take?
About stopping
What happens if I stop this treatment? Is relapse common, and why?
Could my body adapt to this in a way that makes it less effective, or makes stopping harder later?
About cost
What’s the full financial picture — not just the first visit or prescription?
Are there recurring costs I should plan for?
About the whole picture
Has diet, stress, sleep, or lifestyle come up in this conversation, or has it only been about products and prescriptions?
If I’m comparing more than one approach, what does this practitioner see as the honest tradeoff between them?
If you were in my situation, would you opt for the treatment protocol you’re suggesting?
The relationship question
Am I willing to be in this relationship — with this practitioner, this team — for as long as this healing process actually takes?
This isn’t a replacement for your care team, and it isn’t a script to recite word for word — it’s a way to walk out of that appointment with real answers instead of a vague feeling that you were told what to do. If you want more of the reasoning behind why I built this the way I did, here’s the fuller story.