Connecting in a Disconnected World: Tools for Health Professionals to Assess and Expand Adolescent Patients' Connectedness and Webs of Support.

Most health care professionals can help clients connect with others and expand their support networks, and this is within their professional role. For many professionals, we suggest that being able to size up the available sources of support in patients' lives is critical to their overall well-being and creating post-treatment conditions that achieve the greatest health outcomes. This may be especially true for adolescents who often turn to peers and adults outside the home for support. However, identifying potential health care allies in a patient's life can be daunting, and one for which there are few tools or guides. Here we describe several benefits to health care providers from assessing a patient's web of support and their connectedness. We present 2 assessment strategies that can be used by lifestyle medicine practitioners to both assess and expand their patients' webs of support and connectedness to others; these small efforts, we argue, can yield major health benefits, in part, by increasing patient compliance with physician directives.