It's All in Your Head

It's All in Your Head: Change Your Mind, Change Your Health Mark C. Pettus M.D. FACP	The Savvy Patient: The Ultimate Advocate for Quality Health care
The Savvy Patient:The Ultimate Advocate for Quality Health Care What the nation's experts are saying... "Excellent. Contains the best advice I know on doctor-patient negotiations. In clear language it tells how a patient-by asking good questions- can improve the quality of a medical decision." Roger Fisher Director, Harvard Negotiation Project Co-author of "Getting to Yes" "Dr. Mark Pettus has done us all a magnificent favor. In The Savvy Patient he shares the insider's view of medicine we need to get the care we want - a vitally important book that every patient should keep by the bedside." --Daniel Goleman, Author, Emotional Intelligence. "The Savvy Patient: The Ultimate Advocate for Quality Healthcare by Mark Pettus, M.D., helps readers to understand how to navigate complicated health care systems." Publishers Weekly, August 9, 2004 "Imagine taking a journey in which you cannot tell north from south, east from west, or up from down. That's how most people try to navigate today's complex medical environment. They soon discover that a guide is necesary, someone who is familiar with the territory. I cannot imagine a more skillful, compassionate guide than physician Mark C. Pettus, a medical insider who has been there. The Savvy Patient will teach anyone not only how to survive but also to fluorish in any medical encounter. This is the best roadmap to healing I have seen in years. Don't leave home without it!" Larry Dossey, MD Author: Healing Beyond the Boy, Reinventing Medicine, and Healing Words "An incredible source of information, which in the hands of an inspired patient, will help accomplish true healing." Bernie Siegel MD author Love, Medicine, and Miracles, Help Me to Heal and 365 Prescriptions for the Soul "Over one quarter of adverse events that occur during hospitalizations result from substandard care, miscommunication and frank negligence. Don't become a statistic! Learn from Dr. Mark Pettus how to get the edge in navigating our health care system. Written with insight and compassion, Dr. Pettus has made a wonderful contribution to all of us who are, or will some day become, patients." Mark Liponis, MD Medical Director, Canyon Ranch Health Resorts Author, Ultraprevention: The Six Week Plan That Will Make You Healthy For Life Publisher: Capital Books ...coming to all major bookstores and online retailers November, 2004. His new book It's All in Your Head: Change Your Mind and Change Your Life will be published in September, 2006.
From how to choose a primary care provider, coping in the midst of illness, placing a loved one in a nursing home, to resolving conflict, ours can be an overwhelming and intimidating system to navigate. This process is made more challenging as we confront an illness or loss in our lives. For many patients and their families it can feel like flying in severe turbulence or drifting at sea during a storm. Add to that uncertainty and a lack of clarity and it becomes easy to understand how challenging and difficult these circumstances can be for most people. As the complexity of our health care system grows, the necessity for greater consumer savvy grows with it. The obstacles and barriers to more meaningful encounters are more numerous and challenging. For the consumer of health care, they at times seem insurmountable. The Savvy Patient's purpose is to empower you with the insight necessary to get from A to B in your health care experiences. While there is an abundance of information out there that assists with an understanding and treatment of common health ailments, The Savvy Patient provides more insight and advice on the experience itself. It serves as a compass, a guide, and provides easy to understand templates for acquiring pragmatic, immediately useful and critical information. This is information that unfortunately, and all too often, remains unspoken or poorly understood. The spectrum of topics and scope of information will immediately resonate with the reader. The Savvy Patient will have a long “shelf-life” and serve as an excellent reference resource for any health care scenario you might encounter. Health care experiences are inherently multidimensional. The Savvy Patient carefully examines common and challenging health care encounters. The Savvy Patient will enlighten the reader with emphasis on the many dimensions of care that define the experience itself. The Savvy Patient... ...provides clear and easy to understand learning objectives and "Do Not Miss" bullet points, making the information in each chapter easily accesible and user-friendly. ...provides a candid,heartfelt, and sometimes humerous insider’s understanding of what makes our complex system tick. ...reminds you that you are never alone in you health care experiences. ...shares many personal and professional stories that are woven throughout the book to make key points. These stories are sure to resonate with your own experiences, needs, interests, and values. ...provides personal insights into the limitations of our system and guides realistic expectations based on these insights. ...provides question templates to guide in the acquisition of critical information. The reader will know what questions to ask and how and when to ask them. ...offers inspirational support and guidance through the sharing of insight and reflection most people crave from their doctors. ...provides wisdom that will enhance skills in decision making, resolving conflict, and communicating concerns. ...places emphasis on the necessity to shift the “provider-consumer” paradigm to that of a shared partnership. ...lifts the reader with poignant humor, wisdom, and hope, inherent in the potential of any health care experience. The Savvy Patient is about relationships and offers good advice that will enable readers to more effectively develop and sustain the partnerships they have with their providers of care. The Savvy Patient will help you realize the enormous untapped potential within your grasp! Empower yourself! Be in as much control as possible! Be a savvy health care consumer.
Excerpts from The Savvy Patient	Managing Conflict: Anger AND Opportunity