When conducting a consultation, do you usually get your patient to look in a mirror while discussing your assessment? If so, do they see exactly what you see? I’ve found that the answer to this is usually a resounding ‘no’.
With this in mind, have you considered taking photos of your patient and assessing them together in your consultation? This could be used to educate your patients, as well as discuss treatments and their justification. Since implementing the use of images in March last year, I have lost count of how many times patients have looked at a picture I have taken and say they had never noticed an area I had pointed out – even though they didn’t when they looked at themselves in the mirror earlier during the same consultation.
I believe that using patients’ photos can be a very powerful way of holistically examining your patients and showing them all the areas you could help with.
