More waiting rooms are filled these days with highly informed medical consumers seeking to partner with their doctors. They want to explore all promising treatments, both mainstream and alternative. To physicians, these patients seem needy and demanding. They expect a lot of attention, but are all too quick to question authority and battle doctors for control of their medical treatment. To patients, though, physicians can come off as stodgy, even arrogant. Many patients neglect to mention the alternative treatments they are using for fear of disapproval. Some walk away entirely from mainstream medicine.The unfortunate pattern in each case is the same: miscommunication and missed opportunities. Patients do not receive the best care available to them, and doctor-patient relationships fall far short of the caring and mutually satisfying exchanges they could be.How to Talk with Your Doctoris a book for patients and doctors alike. It arms patients with the tools and knowledge they need to communicate better with physicians about using the best high-tech and alternative treatments. At the same time, it helps doctors balance their skepticism of complementary and alternative approaches with open-mindedness.Part One looks at how doctors are trained, what practicing medicine is really like, and why so many physicians still resist nonconventional approaches. It also examines how growing interest in alternative treatments is changing the practice of medicine and how it might change even further-for the better. Part Two offers a blueprint for patients and doctors for maintaining optimal health and dealing with chronic illness. It then explores complementary and conventional options for preventing and treating specific conditions. Separate resource sections for patients and doctors list products, websites, and organizations that can help promote better dialogue and medical collaboration so patients receive the most effective therapies medicine has to offer.

Ronald Hoffman, M.D., is medical director of the Hoffman Center, one of New York City's preeminent complementary care facilities. From 2000 to 2003, he served as president of the American College for the Advancement of Medicine. He is the author of several books as well as the host of the radio program, Health Talk. Sidney Stevens is a veteran health writer and journalist whose work has appeared in numerous national magazines, newspapers, webzines, and literary journals.