Why and how to keep a health diary?

Health - is your greatest asset, however, you pay much less attention to it than you should. Yes, you know it, but how to force yourself to take care of your health better? May be a heath manager like Goopatient, can help you.



Once you have installed GooPatient on your computer (and even more - if bought the family version) - you get a reason to monitor your health. Otherwise, "why did you pay money for it" (or, "why did you spend your time for downloading and installing this program")? Due to this, you start to subconsciously look for a reason to use the program somehow. And when something occurs with your health (for example, you caught a cold), - you think "oh, I should add record about it."

Gradually you begin to pay more and more attention to the signals your body - different symptoms. This, already, is a great value of the program. Usually, people do not pay attention to many of the symptoms until the disease reach a dangerous stage.

The second benefit you get when you put down a health record (describe the case). Feeling and describing symptoms - are two different things. You know how hard it is sometimes to explain a doctor, what and how it hurts. When you formulate and write down your symptoms - you understand them better, localize, memorize. May be you even will be able to understand what causes these symptoms. For example, you'll notice that the reason for the poor condition is a weather change or the meal you ate today. Every time you add a new record to your heath journal, try to note (at least to assume) the factors that triggered the problem.

Describing your symptoms in your health diary allows you to formulate your complaints to your doctor more accurately. Besides, you will better remember the case yourself and if you get the same symptoms again in future - you'll have something to think about. You may find out that you have a problem in the body, such as an allergy to a specific ingredient.

But, of course, Goopatient's role is not only to make you memorize your health cases, but also to securely store this important medical information in your computer. What kind of information you can store in it?

First, it's your basic medical information, which is contained in the electronic medical card (profile): your blood type, diseases, medical treatments, vaccinations, allergies, contraindications, information on health insurance.

Second, (in the health journal) you can record what medications you take under certain symptoms and in what dosage. You can also record the reaction of the organism to certain drugs. And then - print this information for your doctor. Perhaps, he'll decide, that some medications are ineffective for you.

Next type of information that can be stored in Goopatient - is medical tests (blood, urine, ...) and measurements (blood pressure, pulse, blood sugar ...). Typically, they are recorded on paper forms and then get lost somewhere, and in result - important information disappears from your medical history.

If you lose weight, you can put down your weight, the number of calories eaten and the volume of physical exercises. For people with hypertension, it is important to keep a record of blood pressure measurement. For people with diabetes it is important to record the measurement of blood sugar.

Also, it is useful to record doctor names and contacts, track health expenses and insurance contracts. When you see how much you spend on treatment, may be next time you will be more careful with your health and won't expose it to different risks.

And finally, when you accumulate enough health records, you will be able to analyze the progress (or regress) of your health, that will help you to take a decision on changing your lifestyle, diet, physical activity. You can also predict changes in your health in certain periods of time, checking what problems you had in the same month last year, or the year before.

Keeping health records in Goopatient - is as easy as posting messages to Facebook or Twitter. It uses similar hashtags to organize records. By clicking on a hashtag you can view the whole records history about specific problem, drug, symptom or measurement.

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