It's important to be involved in decisions about your treatment and to be given information to help you choose the right treatment. When making treatment choices, you'll often discuss the options with your doctor or another healthcare professional.
The more you know about your condition and treatments, the easier it will be to make your views known and to get the right care. Your personal needs and circumstances may make a big difference to which treatment is best for you, so it’s important to explain these to your doctor.
When and what you can choose
Sometimes, scientific evidence may strongly suggest that one form of treatment is better than others. But even here, there are choices and decisions to be made. You can, for example, choose not to have any treatment.
In other cases, it may be less clear which treatments are best. Here, it's especially important to make sure you understand the options and make your views known.
For example, if you have depression, you may decide to see a counsellor rather than taking antidepressant medicines if you're worried about side effects. Or you may have a condition that can be treated with a single operation, which carries risks, or a series of physiotherapy sessions, which has fewer risks but will take longer.
If in doubt, ask
Feel free to ask if there are other ways to treat a condition and what the doctor or other health professional would advise you to do. You can ask how well the treatment is likely to work (treatments work better in some people than in others), what the common side effects are, how long the treatment will take and how you'll know if it's working.
NHS health professionals are trained to involve you in making important decisions. They can give you expert information and advice and may recommend one treatment over another. But only you know what's most important to you.
If you have questions that are worrying you, write them down and ask them at your next appointment (but remember that doctors are busy so ask the most important questions first). Here is a list of questions you may want to know the answers to.
Consider the evidence
Doctors recommend treatments based on evidence from research and their own experience with other patients. The evidence includes information on how well treatments work, what side effects or complications they have and how they interact with other treatments.
Some of the evidence that health professionals rely on comes from treatment guidelines produced by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).
The NHS offers a choice of the most effective treatments. NICE is responsible for judging whether particular treatments are effective enough for the NHS to use. It balances the benefits of a particular treatment with its cost, and sometimes decides that the benefits are too small and the cost too large, and that the NHS can do more for patients by spending its limited resources elsewhere. This is why some treatments are not available to some NHS patients.
Find out more
To find out as much as you can about a treatment you have been offered, ask your doctor to explain it or use the following sources of information:
- NHS Choices: Health A-Z: information on more than 750 conditions and treatments. Includes more than 20 detailed guides to long-term conditions with details of available treatments.
- NICE summaries of guidance: NICE produces accessible summaries for the public of all its guidelines, describing the treatment choices the NHS offers.
- Charities and patient groups: many publish information about treatments offered by the NHS.
Find out more about these and other options in Getting information on treatments.
Click the bars below to find out about people's personal treatment choices.
