A checklist for a GLP-1 follow-up appointment
A review appointment is ten or fifteen minutes and the ground to cover is three months. Most of what gets lost is not complicated: it is the timing of a symptom, the week the dose changed, the question you meant to ask and remembered in the car park. This is a list of what to have ready and what is worth asking, drawn from the NIH's own patient guidance rather than from opinion.
What to have ready
MedlinePlus's guidance on making the most of a visit is short and it is mostly about preparation: write down your questions, list every medicine, vitamin and supplement including the over-the-counter ones, and describe symptoms with when they started, what makes them better and what makes them worse. For a GLP-1 review that turns into five specific things.
- What you actually took, and when. Dates of injections, the amount each time, and any you missed. "Roughly weekly since spring" is not the same answer as a list of dates, and the second one is the one that shows a gap.
- When the dose last changed. Almost every question in a review (is it working, are the side effects settling) is really a question about what happened since that date.
- Symptoms with their timing. Not "I had nausea" but when, how strong, how long it lasted, and where it fell relative to a dose. MedlinePlus asks for exactly this shape: onset, what helps, what makes it worse.
- The weight trend, not this morning's number. A single reading is noise. What the appointment can use is the direction over weeks and whether it changed after the dose did.
- Every other medicine and supplement. Including the ones bought without a prescription. This is on the NIH list for a reason: interactions are the thing a clinician cannot check for if they do not know.
Questions worth asking
These are not our suggestions. MedlinePlus publishes a list of questions to ask a provider about any medicine you are taking, and these are the ones from it that land hardest in a GLP-1 review, quoted as written:
- "How will I know if this medicine is working?"
- "What side effects might I expect? Should I report them?"
- "How long will I have to take it?"
- "If I forget to take it, what should I do?"
- "What should I do if I feel I want to stop taking this medicine? Is it safe to just stop?"
- "Are there any lab tests to check the medicine's level in my body or for any harmful side effects?"
- "Will this medicine change how my other medicines work?"
NIDDK's page on choosing a weight-loss programme adds three that are about you rather than the drug: "Am I at a healthy weight?", "How is my weight affecting my health?" and "Will losing weight improve my general health, as well as specific health problems I have?"
Write the questions down before you go
This is the single suggestion every one of these sources repeats, and it is the one people skip. A question you are holding in your head competes with the conversation you are having; a question on paper waits its turn. The same guidance suggests taking notes during the visit, and bringing someone with you if there is a lot to take in, not because you cannot follow it, but because two people remember more of a fast fifteen minutes than one does.
What a checklist cannot do
It cannot tell you what the answer should be. Whether the dose changes, whether it is time to stop, whether a symptom needs investigating: none of that is decided by how well you prepared, and a page on the internet that told you what to push for would be doing something it has no standing to do. What preparation changes is the quality of the information in the room. The decision was always going to be theirs.
It also does not replace urgency. If something is wrong now (severe abdominal pain, persistent vomiting, signs of an allergic reaction) that is not a thing to save for the appointment. The side-effects guide lists what warrants immediate care.
Or let the app assemble it
Pick a date range and what goes in it (doses, weight, side effects, your own notes and the questions you wrote down during the month) and Dozify builds a PDF you can print or send ahead. Made on the phone; nothing is uploaded.
Download the app What the report contains →Questions
How far back should the summary go?
As far as the last appointment, usually: that is the period nobody in the room has seen yet. For a first visit with a new clinician, longer, because they are starting from nothing.
Is it strange to hand my doctor a printout?
The NIH guidance suggests bringing written lists of medicines, symptoms and questions, so a page that contains all three is the same idea with fewer sheets of paper. What makes it useful is that it is dated records rather than recollection.
I have not tracked anything. Is it worth going in with nothing?
Yes — go. An appointment with no records is still an appointment, and the honest answer "I do not remember exactly" is more useful to a clinician than a confident wrong date. Then start recording from that day, and the next review has three months behind it.
Should I ask for a dose increase if the weight has stalled?
That is not a question this page will answer. Bring what happened (the trend, the dates, the side effects) and let the person who prescribed it decide what follows from it. Titration is a clinical decision with its own schedule and its own reasons for pausing.
What if I run out of time in the appointment?
Put the questions in the order that matters to you before you go in, so the ones that get answered are the ones you cared about. Anything left over is a reason to ask how to follow up: by phone, by message, or at the next visit.
Educational information, not medical advice. Dozify is a personal tracking app, not a medical device. This page collects publicly published patient guidance and does not recommend a dose, a schedule or a course of action for any individual. If you have severe symptoms, seek medical care or call your local emergency number.