Start with a phone call. Your doctor’s office has a triage line and a nurse will talk it through with you. They are genuinely good at this, they do it all day, and it costs nothing. Most practices have a phone line where a nurse takes calls about whether something needs to be seen, and how soon. It is often not advertised — you ring the main number and ask to speak to the triage nurse. There is no charge and you do not need an appointment to use it.
If it feels more serious than that, go to urgent care. You will usually be seen faster than at a hospital, and the care is good.
If it feels life-threatening, call 911 or go to the emergency room. Do not wait until you are sure.
Which one is yours to decide, not ours. But our advice is to assume it is worse than it looks and take the more cautious road. And trust your body — if it is telling you something is wrong, it is probably right. The best possible outcome of a trip to the emergency room is walking out saying well, that was a waste of an evening — but I feel a lot better knowing it is nothing serious.
Before you call, have these ready. They are what the nurse will ask, and the call goes better when you are not working them out on the phone.
You are not diagnosing yourself by having this ready. You are handing them the things they would otherwise spend the call extracting — and the decision stays entirely theirs.
Writing to the portal instead of calling? The same list works, in that order, in one message. Put the direction it is going and the immune-system line near the top — portal messages get read quickly, and those two change how the rest is read.
Beta. This site is real work with its sources shown, and it is not finished. If something here is wrong, the box at the foot of the page reaches a person. Nothing here is a diagnosis.
Five ways, in the order they actually matter to us. The first four are free and are worth more to the work than the fifth. We put money last because it is last.
This is first, and it is not politeness. Every claim on this site carries a grade, and the honest grades are the ones that make the good ones worth anything. A page that is corrected is better than a page that is agreed with, and we would rather be told early by you than late by everybody.
Use the comment rail in the margin of any page. It opens where you are and keeps your place. One sentence is a complete answer.
If you work in medicine, there is a specific set of things we have guessed at and cannot check — five assumptions about your side of the chart, each written so it can be corrected in a line. Correcting one of them is worth more to us than agreeing with all five.
When you type a question and this site cannot match it, that is the most useful thing that happens here all day. It is the record of where our words and yours part company, and it is how the writing gets fixed.
So ask badly, ask sideways, ask the thing you would not say out loud. If we miss, we will ask whether we may keep the question so we can go and write the answer. You can say no, and it is asked once.
One observation looks like nothing. Four hundred of the same observation is a signal nobody has collected. If something happened to you, or to somebody you look after, and it did not match what you were told to expect — that is data, and it is currently being thrown away everywhere.
How to write it down so it still counts in a year →
This is open to anyone who is interested. Graduate students, high school students, grandmothers, researchers, people with no letters after their name at all. It is not a patients-and-carers programme and we would ask you not to read it as one.
Not a share button and not a campaign. If you know somebody who is going into an appointment frightened, or who has been handed a result nobody explained, send them the page that would have helped you.
That is how everything here arrived in the first place. What you found was written by people who went through it before you and said so. We think we owe the same to whoever comes next, and frankly we think you do too.
No one is ever turned away because of cost. That is true whatever you do on this page, and it does not depend on funding arriving. It depends only on us.
If this was worth something to you, contribute what you think it was worth, based on what you can afford, at whatever interval feels right. There is no amount, no tier, and nothing is withheld from anyone who gives nothing.
We are asking exactly once — this is it. We will never solicit you again. You may see a quiet line at the foot of a page pointing back here. That is as far as it will ever go.
What this page is not. There is no sign-up, no membership and no account.
Nothing here is withheld from anybody, and nothing on this page changes what you can read
or use. The four things above are listed before money because they are worth more than
money to the work, which is a statement about what this is, not a way of softening the
fifth.
Still to come. There is no way to actually send a contribution yet, and
saying so is better than a button that goes nowhere. The comment rail works today; the
question capture works today; the rest is honest about being early, like the rest of
the site.
Last updated . When we get something wrong we correct it and say what changed.
This work began because of what our own family ran into — my wife's illness, and the years of appointments, records and unanswered questions that came with it. Nothing here describes anyone's medical history. It was built around those needs, not about them, so that the next person has something we did not.