Here's a Little Tip

It seems as though the older you get, the more time you spend at doctor's offices. You play some basketball for the first time in twenty years or trip over the dog or something like that and you end up with excruciating pain in your knee or whatever.  So you go to your family practice doctor who sends to to a specialist to get it checked out.  Every time that happens you go through the same routine.  The receptionist hands you a sheaf of papers and asks to you write down all of your medical information, lifestyle info and medical history, what you had for breakfast, what your sign is, who you voted for on American Idol and a bajillion other things you don't think they really need to know.  So there you are, all distracted by the pain or discomfort that caused you to go to the specialist in the first place, and you have to try to remember all of your allergies, significant past medical events and whatever.  What a pain! (Pun intended.)

A few years back I grumbled about this problem to a coworker who gave me a really good way to resolve it. She told me that she had made up a spreadsheet with all of her medical history and pertinent information.  When she went to a new doctor and had to fill out the medical history forms, she just copied the data from her spreadsheet.  I thought this was a really good idea, so I stole it.

I tried using a spreadsheet but that just didn't work out for me.  So I used a word processing program, similar to Microsoft Word, to create a medical history document for me and another for my wife.  Fortunately I had old medical records that dated back forty years so the data was close at hand.  In fact, putting the data into a document allowed me to get rid of those old records.  Now I have the data stored on the computer and backed up to some removable media so I can print it out whenever I want to.  Of course if you are really high tech you can always download the data to your phone so you don't even have to carry the paper document with you.

Here's an outline of the data that my wife and I have in our medical history.

• Doctors  Here we list the names and contact information for the doctors that we see regularly, like our family practice doctor, e.g.
• Allergies We list what we are allergic to and what sort of reaction we get.
• Current medication  This section lists the medicines we take, including over the counter medications, vitamins, etc., and the dosage and frequency as well as the reason for taking them.
• Health habits  It seems that these days doctors want to know if you smoke or drink alcoholic beverages as well as the amount and frequency that you use them.  So we include that here. Also, in the case of things that we used to do but don't do any longer, like smoking, we list when we quit and the frequency we used in the past.
• Blood chemistry  This is where we list the info that we get from the doctor when we have a cholesterol check.  Most doctors who are interested in this information will want to do their own check, but some will not.  Also, if you have had something like a calcium score in the past, a cardiologist might want to know what the value was, and this is a good place to list that.
• Previous tests, procedure, operations, vaccinations and the like  We list what we had done, who did it, on what date and for what reason.
• Previous drugs and prescriptions  It is useful to list here those drugs which you have taken in the past and which did not generate an allergic reaction.  This is useful if, e.g., you are allergic to penicillin and your doctor wants to prescribe some other antibiotic that you know you're not allergic to.
• Previous illnesses In this section we list conditions we have had in the past and for which we have been treated by a doctor.  This is useful to determine patterns.  E.g., if you have had chest pain quite a few times in the past and have had EKGs or some other tests that had a negative result, that might be useful for a doctor who has to evaluate you for chest pains in the future.
• Family history In this section we list things that seem to run in the family (e.g., some particular type of cancer) as well as cause of death of parents and close relatives and their age at time of death.

It takes some time to pull a medical history like this together, but it saves even more time when you have to provide the information to a new doctor, especially if you are under some stress when you have to provide it.  A word of caution, though, don't include any identifying info like your social security number, insurance id or whatever, just in case the medical history falls into the wrong hands.