Don’t bother to call me. I rarely answer my phone. A worse idea would be to leave me a message. I still haven’t checked a few since the transplant. But text me and I’ll most likely respond in kind. It’s not that I don’t like staying in touch or that I’m extremely lazy. I just don’t handle the phone so well. But with texts, you say what you need to quick and easy.
And so you can imagine my excitement when I found out doctors will now text you. In a recent study, teenage transplant patients who got regular texts from their doctors were less likely to go through rejection. It’s not that the new liver prefers texts over phone calls. Rather patients just remembered to take their medicine more often if they got a text reminding them. And so just two people out of the 41 participants experienced rejection, compared with 12 out of 41 the year before.
It’s as easy as ever to get in contact with your doctor nowadays. If texts aren’t your favorite form of communication, there’s always email. Columbia Presbyterian health care providers use RelayHeath, a non-emergency contact site, to stay in touch with their patients. You can schedule appointments, talk with your provider, even link your pharmacy to the system (for a transplant patient, that’s a lot more exciting than it sounds).
People might argue that this all dulls the doctor-patient relationship in some way. Of course, the argument can be said about all technology. No matter how connected it makes us, it inevitably feels less sincere. And so an occasional phone call might be good. A visit once in a while even better. At the end of the day, it’s whatever makes us feel better. Even if it’s 160 characters or less.
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