Questions you MUST ask your Doctor when diagnosed with Celiac Disease Ep. 11

It's important to work alongside your Doctor when diagnosed with Celiac Disease.
In this week's episode, I am sharing a list of questions for you to ask at your next appointment.

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Transcript

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Speaker 1 0:48

Welcome back to this week's episode. In this week's episode, we are talking about what you need to ask your doctor once you've been diagnosed with celiac disease. So I'm giving you five questions that you need to ask. Now, the reason I wanted to make this episode for you is because I'm hearing more and more people aren't being given this information from their doctors, and aren't aware that they need to do these things. So these are the questions that I want you to ask your doctor. Now, if you've been diagnosed very recently. Awesome. Go ahead and ask these questions. If it's been some time since you've been diagnosed, then some of these questions are still very relevant to you and will help support you. So let's jump in to number one. So the first thing I want you to do is I want you to ask your doctor or your primary caregiver to write for you a referral letter for your immediate family members to be tested. So this is super important. Anyone that's, your direct immediate family member also needs to be tested for celiac disease. Now the best way to get them to get straight onto doing that is getting a referral letter from your doctor, because they can explain in that letter that an immediate family member has been diagnosed with celiac disease and it's imperative that they also get tested. Now I've actually had a few people reach out to me recently about this. And our TA told me that they have got family members that are refusing to get tested. And that's really, really hard. And I think I'm going to make an episode completely about that topic. So stay tuned. And I think that'll be really important. We'll get to the bottom of that. So if you've got any questions about that in the meantime, please send me a DM over on Instagram and I can help support you with that. And we can add a little bit more information relevant to what you need to know over on the podcast episode that I will put together for you. All right. So the second thing I want you to ask, can you recommend a dietician or a nutritionist who specializes in gluten free or celiac disease? This is super important because as you know, with my story that I've talked about in the past, the dietician that I was put onto had no clue about celiac disease, he was not a specialist. It wasn't his expertise. And he failed me beat time. He failed me miserably and he didn't give me the support that I needed. So I want you to ask your doctor to recommend or help you find someone that is a specialist in that area, because that's where you're going to get some really fantastic support. All right, number three, I want you to ask which follow-up tests do you need. So some people walk away with their diagnosis and don't get any further followup testing. So when I was diagnosed, I had a bone mineral density test to see how my bones were. And this is important because as you know, when you have deficiencies, your body starts to break down. So if you've been struggling with celiac disease for quite some time and your body hasn't been absorbing the nutrients that it needs, your bones may have started to break down and you may have started that , um, you know , the onset of osteoporosis. So it's important. Find that out from the start. So I'd recommend you go and get that sorted out. Also ask which blood tests you need to be getting done. Do you need to have ongoing blood tests to check that there's no gluten in your body, in your system and also endoscopy's colonoscopies? What do you need ongoing? This might be something that more your gastroenterologist will do with you, but it's definitely worth asking your primary caregiver or your doctor, these questions as well. All right . So number four, what do you need each year to maintain your health? What is it ongoing that you're going to work with with your primary caregiver to make sure that your health is where it needs

Speaker 2 5:00

To be? Year-in year-out year out,

Speaker 1 5:04

Number five. I want you to check which vitamin deficiencies that you may have, and then therefore that way you can work out which supplements that you may need rather than playing the whole guessing game. So you might be low in iron, so that something that you definitely don't want to be taking, unless, you know, you have an iron

Speaker 2 5:23

Deficiency is very, very important.

Speaker 1 5:26

If you have deficiencies in other areas, then it can certainly help with that. So for example, if you are low in vitamin D, that can lead to other problems such as depression. So, you know, we want to be getting on top of these things and we want to make sure that we taking supplements to support our health and to support our ongoing health needs. So please make sure that you ask these questions. So just to quickly recap for you, I want you to ask for a referral letter for your immediate family members to be tested. So when we talk about referral letters for your immediate family, we're talking your mom, your dad, any of your children, any of your siblings, okay. Then number two, I want you to ask if your doctor can recommend a dietician or a nutritionist who specializes in gluten-free or celiac disease, number three, you're going to ask which followup tests you need. Number four, what do you need to do each year to maintain your health and number five, which vitamin deficiencies might you have and therefore, which supplements do you need. So if you haven't gone through these questions with your primary caregiver or your doctor, I want you to make an appointment and go and get on top of these as soon as you possibly can. And if you've already got an appointment coming up, then go through them with your doctor and get some further support. So I'd love to hear from you. Are these all new to you was one of these new to whether it , you know, have you done all of these things? I'd really love to know if this episode has helped you. So please send me a DM over on Instagram, and I'd really love it. If you could take a few moments to leave a review for this podcast, that way it helps get it out there in front of more people and to help them. So thanks so much for listening and I'll talk again with you real soon. Bye.