Your First Consultation

The clinic at 2 Austin Street, Lane Cove — opposite the library and metres from Longueville Road — has practitioners from several disciplines in one building, and that changes what a first appointment can do.

What it means in practice: the assessment is not confined to what the person in front of you happens to do. If the picture looks like a pelvic floor problem, a nutrition problem, or a musculoskeletal one, you can be pointed across the corridor rather than sent away with a phone number and a hope. With your permission, practitioners here talk to each other about shared patients.

The structure of the hour. The complaint and its history. The systems review, which covers ground you may not expect — sleep, digestion, energy, mood, medications. Examination appropriate to the problem. Then an honest sorting: what needs a doctor and which test, which discipline is the right fit, and what can start today.

What we are clear about. Several things belong with your GP first, and we will say so: anything with fever, unexplained weight loss, bleeding, progressive weakness, or any new unexplained symptom. Mood, anxiety and trauma belong with a psychologist, arranged through a GP mental health treatment plan.

Bring imaging, specialist letters, recent blood results and a full list of what you take. Parking behind the library is usually the easiest option in the middle of the day.

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.