Following trends of the most important numbers in your life is important.
No, not the stock market. These numbers are worth watching, but they are not the numbers that can save your life. What I am really concerned about are the numbers that I receive from my lab work. For most of my adult life these number were handed to me on sheets of paper which I took home and put into a file to refer to when needed. Today the default method of updating patient knowledge of their health status is to send them an email telling them to log into a portal and look at a screen which shows a few pieces of data at a time. I am probably not the only one frustrated by this. What to do?
Here is the problem. I want to know more than if my “number” falls within the normal range last week. I want to see if it is up or down from previous years/months. Heck, I want to know what it looked like five years ago. In order to understand your health status and head off troublesome outcomes, you need to see trends, not isolated numbers. You also want to keep track of where, within a range, your number falls.
Given that we see several doctors over time, and given that these docs use a variety of portals, it is important to have one go to place to save your information. Without this storage place we cannot follow trends. It is the trending of our numbers that matters because we are all unique humans. I know what my cholesterol was last week at the doctor’s visit. What was it 10 years ago? How has it changed? How has my lifestyle changed?
To the left is a snippet of a spreadsheet I started 20 years ago when my stack of sheets from doctors was growing large. At this time i was concerned about having my personal information in an assortment of portals as well.
Today I come home from my doctor visits or lab visits and enter the information immediately. In doing this I can see trending while I am entering information. I immediately can check where I was 5, 10 or 15 years ago.
Having my numbers in a sheet like this is also handy when working with a new doctor. Trending offers a much better picture of your past and present status and helps with making decisions about the direction forward.
Attached is an alphabetized 100 item spreadsheet that you may download. The sheet is excel. There are several free spreadsheet applications you can use if you do not have excel. If you do not have excel there are some free options to be downloaded that support excel functions: https://www.lifewire.com/free-spreadsheet-programs-1356337