Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [79]
A couple of years ago, I visited the Canyon Ranch wellness center in Lenox, Massachusetts. After a host of blood tests, body scans, cardio stress tests, exercise evaluations, and even gene reports, I finished my stay with more medical and fitness information about myself than I could ever have imagined. The information that was most interesting was the fitness information. I’ve used this as a foundation to compare with fitness facts I record today.
I wear a Polar heart monitor strap whenever I work out. This allows me to capture heart information and compare it to what I’ve received at Canyon Ranch and subsequent tests with my cardiologists. My trainer has created a program tailored to help with my heart and with my core. (Supposedly we have balance issues as we age that I clearly observe.) After scanning this into my e-memory, I can now track my progress and it is easy for her to make changes to the training program electronically.
Dr. Christiane Northrup’s research has found that walking ten thousand steps a day helps your heart stay healthy. I now wear a pedometer, which downloads what I walk each day into my e-memory. Some days are better than others, but over the last year or so, I have actually averaged about ten thousand steps a day. Dr. Northrup would be as happy as my heart is.
You should determine the area of your health that is most important to you, and get a device that helps you quantify your status. For example, to track your fitness, you might get the BodyBugg arm strap that I mentioned in the health chapter. If you are concerned about your blood pressure, you should buy something like the Omron HEM-790IT blood pressure monitor, which will enable you to upload data to the Microsoft HealthVault.
I’ve already advised you to get rid of all your paper, so don’t get too upset when I tell you to acquire even more paper that you will need to scan. If you really want total control of your health information, first you need to obtain it, which, sadly, nearly always means paper. You will need to contact every doctor, specialist, dentist, hospital, or health facility that has a record of you. You will need to write or fax them to obtain a copy of these records; a phone call won’t suffice. Keep a list of all of them and check it off as you receive each record. Also, you will need to do the same to obtain your medical insurance “explanation of benefits” forms, if you don’t have them already. Although this aspect of Total Recall took the most time for me to accomplish, having these records and measurements at my fingertips has saved my life after my double bypass redux.
Quicken Health is a database on your own computer that keeps track of the paper blizzard that is typical of a chronic condition or a major procedure. It holds all the letters, bills, and insurance documents—it tracks the money flow and who paid what, when. While such systems are substantially more detailed than financial transactions, they are more than a decade behind the financial industries in terms of their ability to handle health transactions in a humane way. This program was created by a frustrated Quicken employee who saw it as the only way to follow the paper.
With paper under control, you can move on to electronic information. Some physicians communicate via a proprietary e-mail system. You should keep copies of these conversations for your life bits. As more providers in your health-care network go digital, be sure to ask if you can download copies of reports, prescriptions, X-rays, or whatever they will let you have.
TAKE NOTES
Lifelogging will be increasingly automatic. However, right now there is no replacement for just recording a few phrases or sentences. Doing this is more comfortable in a work or educational setting, but whether it is a “note to self,” notes about a meeting, or an epigram you want to remember, make a note and give it a date and a place.
In meetings, I like to use OneNote. I can type, or I can use handwriting and draw things using my tablet computer. OneNote can record