Make Visible: Chronic Illness Explored #30 Navigating medical appointments with Dr Alba Azola
Mar 20, 2026
Dr Alba Azola, a rehabilitation physician leading the ME/CFS program at Johns Hopkins, shares practical strategies for navigating medical care. She discusses building multidisciplinary teams, using symptom diaries and pacing, preparing focused appointments, and tools like heart rate data to communicate limits. The conversation highlights targeted, symptom-focused approaches and ways to access and coordinate the care you need.
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Physical Therapy Worsened Some Patients
- Dr Alba Azola described seeing nurses who initially walked but later became wheelchair users after standard physical therapy worsened them.
- That observation prompted her to learn alternative assessment and treatment approaches from specialists like Dr Peter Rowe.
Concise Tables Make Guidelines Usable
- Distilling multidisciplinary expertise into concise, actionable tables is necessary because PCPs have limited time.
- Alba described the compendium team's challenge of prioritising only tests and treatments a busy PCP can realistically use.
Quarterback Clinician Beats Fragmented Care
- Complex chronic illness care suffers from siloed subspecialty medicine, leaving patients unable to access coordinated care.
- Dr Alba Azola argues for a 'quarterback' clinician who understands initial assessment, interventions, and referral timing.