Your First Consultation

Appointments here are longer than most and it is fair to ask what the extra time buys.

What it buys is the whole list. Most people arrive with more than one thing and have only ever been able to raise one at a time in an eight-minute appointment. An hour is enough to put six complaints on one page, in order of what each actually costs you, and then look for the connections — which are usually fewer and more mundane than people fear.

The shape of it. Complaint first. Then sleep, digestion, energy, mood, pain, medications and supplements, alcohol, the working week, and what has been tested and when. Then examination appropriate to the problem. Then the sorting, which is the valuable part: what needs a doctor and which test, what needs a different practitioner, and what is left for us.

You should leave with four things written down: the list in order, the tests or referrals to ask your GP for, two things to change, and a review date. Not ten things to change — two, chosen because they survive a bad week.

What to bring: your medication and supplement list including the things you do not count as medicine, any imaging or specialist letters, recent blood results, and dates where anything is cyclical. The clinic is in Lane Cove, five minutes from the village, and the sorted list goes to your GP.

Mostly questions, and better ones than you expect

A first appointment is largely conversation. Where the problem is, what makes it worse, what it stops you doing, and how it has behaved over weeks rather than days. Then the questions that seem unrelated and are not: how you sleep, how you digest, what your energy does across the day, what changed around the time this started.

That last one matters more than most people expect. Problems rarely begin on the day they become noticeable.

The part that is not talking

Depending on what you have come for, there is some form of examination — movement testing, palpation, looking at how you stand or hold yourself. It is explained before it happens, and it stops the moment you want it to.

You stay dressed unless there is a reason not to, and if there is, you are told why first and given privacy to change.

How long it takes

A first appointment runs longer than the ones after it, because most of it is the history. Follow-up sessions are shorter and more focused. The exact time varies by practitioner and by what you have come for — ask when you book, and you should get a straight number.

What you should leave knowing

Three things, and if you do not have them, ask before you go:

• What they think is going on, in words you can repeat to someone else.
• What they propose, and roughly how long that usually takes.
• What would change the plan — including what would make them send you elsewhere.

A practitioner who cannot say what would make them change course has not really made a plan.

What will not happen

Nobody will tell you to stop a medication your doctor has prescribed. Nobody will tell you that a scan or a specialist appointment is unnecessary. And nobody will promise you a particular result in a particular number of visits, because that is not something anyone can know.

If something you describe needs medical assessment rather than this kind of treatment, you should be told so in the first session rather than the sixth.

What comes next

Usually you leave with a treatment plan — what is proposed, how often, and when it gets reviewed.