Doctors have a lot of responsibilities, and often, a meeting with your doctor can feel rushed or hurried. Through no fault of their own, doctors end up with too little time for individual patients, and you might end up with your appointment ending before you know what's happened!

As a patient, the only thing you can control is how prepared you are for the appointment! This sounds obvious, but it's true and it makes a big difference in what can be accomplished in the same amount of time.

For the purposes of this Hub and the discussion on rosacea treatment, the answer comes down to 2 things - being ready to answer the questions the doctor will ask you, and knowing in advance the questions you will have for the doctor.

(In fact, we wrote another Hub just on that second point, and you can read it here: Rosacea Treatment: Questions to Ask Your Doctor.)

What sort of questions are likely to come up when you first meet with a doctor in regards to having rosacea? Of course, each doctor is different, but surely any consultation will address the themes presented below in our questions.

Question: What are you symptoms and at what point did these symptoms begin?

The doctor certainly will want to know when rosacea made itself evident.

Question: How often do your rosacea symptoms appear? Do they come and go and if so, how much time passes between flareups?

This is important for the purposes of diagnosing the severity of your rosacea.

Question: Have you found any relief in using ______ treatment?

The doctor is going to want to know any history you have with medicines and natural rosacea treatments.

Question: What situations, foods, medicines, etc appear to worsen the symptoms?

This question relates to what's known as rosacea triggers, which is anything that brings about a flareup of rosacea symptoms.

From the angle that all these questions take, it's easy to see how important it is for the patient to be able to share the right information with the doctor. The best way to know the answers to these questions is to pay careful attention to when your symptoms appear, what your were doing (or eating, etc), and specifics on the experience (blushing, inflammation, skin break out, etc).

Doctors will often suggest keeping a journal of sorts to log the information. Basics just as time of day, the date, and what happened is enough. The idea is to have the data available to find patterns that lead to being able to form a counteracting plan to control the symptoms.