How to Compile Your Family Medical History

With all that is known in today's world about health linkage to genetics, it is important to have a complete picture of the health of your family both recently and in the past. Serious illness is often linked to predisposition in your family health history. Compile a picture of your relatives and ancestors to aid doctors in making diagnoses.

Difficulty:

Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Begin your family history by starting with yourself. Draw a family tree for yourself. This tree will aid you in getting and organizing the information that will be useful to include. Design a questionnaire of the important facts that you need to know about each member. Since you will personally speak with many of these people, you don't want to forget anything when you are actually with them.

2. Contact as many of the people on your medical family tree as possible and interview them personally. This will give you a chance to check on them and rekindle lines of communication that may have decayed with time. Take the opportunity to visit with the ones on the chart that are close and are still living. Keep your ears open and attentive as you may find out information that they didn't think was important but gives you some insight into their health.

3. Write to relatives that are too far away to visit or that you don't have any other way to reach. Many more distant relatives can contribute to the family medical history picture, but you may have lost touch and can't find them. Ask those in the family that you have spoken with if they know how to get in touch with these relatives. You may have to broaden your search to find out about some relatives. Ask their descendents about the health of their parents and grandparents. They may be able to help greatly in compiling information. Offer to share some of the information that you have gathered with them as well.

4. Compile all this information in one place and organize it so that it can provide answers if needed. Offer to share this information with your doctor and ask them to help in filling out a brief history on you so that if you ever change doctors in the future or move, the new doctors have a complete picture.

5. Keep a listing of all the doctor's names, addresses and phone numbers that have seen you or our relatives so that if the need arises, your doctor can get in touch with them in the future.