What should a surgeon’s condition page include?

Start with the short version

Most visitors read the top of a page and decide whether to keep going. Put four or five plain sentences at the top that a patient could repeat to a family member: what the condition is, how it is usually treated, and when to call the office. Every condition guide on DrCRodriguez.com opens with a boxed short version before anything else.

Follow the order of the conversation in clinic

A patient reading your page is asking the same questions they will ask you across the desk. Answer them in that order:

• What the condition is and why it happens.
• Symptoms and warning signs, including when to go to an emergency department.
• What happens if nothing is done.
• The treatment choices, including watchful waiting or treatment without surgery where your specialty’s guidelines support it.
• What the operation involves, in the order you do it.
• Recovery: pain control, activity, wound care and return to work.
• When to call the office.

When the page follows the same order as your consultation, patients arrive with better questions and the visit covers more ground.

Write it the way you say it

Patients read a condition page to hear from the surgeon they are about to see. Use the explanation you give every patient, including the comparisons that work for you. Translate or drop terms a patient will not know. On DrCRodriguez.com the target is an eighth-grade reading level, and specialist terms carry a pop-up definition instead of an explanation in the middle of a sentence.

The National Institutes of Health’s Clear & Simple guide covers how to plan and test plain-language material. It cites the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which found that about 14 percent of the adults surveyed could understand only basic, simple English text.

Tie every clinical statement to a source

A statement a patient could act on should rest on your specialty society’s guidance or on published evidence. You do not need a footnote on every sentence, but you should be able to name the source for each one. The page carries your name, so read every word before it goes live.

Put the handout and the next step on the page

• The matching patient handout, as a PDF hosted on your own site.
• Related reading: the procedure page, the recovery page and the questions patients ask most.
• One clear next step, usually a call to the office, with the number set up as a tap-to-call link on a phone.

What to leave out

• Patient photographs and case details. A public page holds no patient information.
• Success rates and outcome promises you cannot source.
• Operations you rarely perform. A page invites the question, so feature what you do.

Questions physicians ask

How long should a condition page be?

Long enough to answer the questions patients ask you in clinic, and no longer. A short-version box at the top lets a patient stop after five sentences and still leave with the essentials.

Should each operation have its own page?

When the approaches differ in what a patient goes through, yes. DrCRodriguez.com has separate pages for robotic and open hernia repair so each page can describe one recovery accurately.