Broadly speaking, gathering more information - pulling all the relevant facts and details together to get a clearer picture about what may be going on - is a useful first step in performing a symptom check. For example, with a minor health problem such as a sore throat, you know that the problem's prone to go away by itself and you need only treat your symptoms before problem disappears inside a week or two.
But establishing the facts is still helpful to identify whether you might be faced with a more complex health condition than you first thought. Which questions are relevant and important depends on the medical problem facing you.
Up to now, maybe you've left this fact-finding mission - called using the history - largely to some health professional. And rightly so: taking a highly effective history is a complex task helping medical professionals to gather all the information they need to reach a working diagnosis, order further tests and agree the very best plan of action with you - it takes many years of training to do this well.
But you can also perform a bit of detective work yourself. Equipped with a bit of basic knowledge, doing this helps you to consider possible underlying reasons for your health problems. And knowing what's happened and when - and to which circumstances - can give you and your doctor some important clues. But don't worry - this is actually only about becoming better at deciding when to seek medical help. In the same way that you can learn to straighten out simple computer problems without being a software engineer - while knowing your limits - you can become better at managing your health symptoms yourself and knowing at what stage to inquire about help.
Without much consideration, people often come to their own conclusions about a health problem. Even if you're unsure precisely what's going on, you may often have a feeling about whether your problem's apt to be serious or not. This process is often almost automatic and subconscious, and thus try consciously to work out what your instinct is suggesting - and why. You might in fact curently have an idea of what's causing your symptom(s).
When you develop a health problem like a headache, tiredness or shoulder pain, mapping out a period of your symptoms can be extremely useful for identifying the underlying cause and helping you - as well as health professionals - with assessing your symptoms. Attempt to remember when the problem started and how it developed. Consider the following factors:
Onset: Think about:
To give you an example of why establishing this post is important, a sudden severe pain in your knee that starts while you're playing football and that doesn't get better suggests a ligament injury, whereas a gradual start of knee pain over months or years is more apt to be due to something for example arthritis.
Circumstances: Ask yourself:
After establishing when the problem started and to which circumstances, look in more detail into what went down. In particular, attempt to figure out the following:
Frequency: Ask yourself:
If you don't have the symptom all the time, how often do you get it? To give you an example, an intermittent headache that you've for a while up to and including few times every month, can last for a few days and completely disappears between episodes, is probably more likely due to migraine rather than anything else.
Duration: Ask yourself:
For instance, diarrhoea for only a day approximately is likely to be due to an infection, whereas if you have loose stools for weeks, months as well as years, other causes are much more likely.
Progression: Ask yourself:
To provide you with an example, a tummy pain that you have had for only a couple of hours that gets worse quickly is likely to be more serious than one that you have had occasionally for a long time that only very gradually gets worse. In most cases, you can be a bit more relaxed about health issues that get better by themselves.
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