Your doctor has probably asked you at one time or another about your family health history. If you responded to your doctor’s inquiry by saying “What’s a family health history” or if you have some information written down but forgot to bring it with you, you will be pleased to know that there is a way you can avoid such embarrassment the next time your doctor asks you about it. You see, like many things these days, there’s an app for that. Unfortunately, that app may not serve the purpose of providing your entire family medical history, as I found out upon reviewing it.
Today, I looked at an app for Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Mac, etc.) called “Family Medical History” by Da Pont. The app is available through iTunes. This app seems to have good ratings, and appears at first glance to be rather comprehensive. It enables users to keep important health information like blood type, allergy information, prescriptions, and emergency numbers in an easily accessible location. The one caveat that I have about this app is that it seems to deal more with your health over your lifetime (and the health of your spouse and kids too) than it does with information about other relatives like your parents and grandparents, so the name seems to be a little misleading.
If you would like to create a family health history that you can take with you, the office of the Surgeon General has created a program called “My Family Health Portrait”. The program is a web-based tool that enables you to create and print a comprehensive collection of the ailments of your ancestors. Depending upon how many illnesses are in your family and how big your family is, it will take you fifteen minutes or more to create your family health history. Considering how important your health is and how important providing accurate information about family illnesses to your doctor is, I would say that any time that you spend using this program is time well spent.
Photo by anitapatterson on morguefile.com.