Your Family Doctors Want To Know All They Can To Help You

If you haven’t already found an excellent family medical practice to help take care of your family’s health care needs, the time is now.

It’s almost universally known that families face new and growing health threats, and one of the best protective measures you can take is to identify and get to know some outstanding family medical practitioners in your area.

Your family doctors, nurses, and nurse practitioners will want to get to know you, your spouse, your kids, and any elderly folks in your household, too. They’ll want to learn everything they can to help you all live longer, more robust lives.

That’s why you get a clipboard full of forms to fill out when you first visit your new family clinic. It might seem onerous, filling out all those papers… but the information you provide may make a big difference in the quality of health care you can receive from your new providers.

You’ll want to know – or be able to find – every bit of information you can on your family medical history.


Why Is Family Medical History Important?

Some people wonder why all that family history paperwork is necessary. The short answer is that getting the fullest possible picture of your family’s medical history helps your doctors and nurses immeasurably in knowing what to look for, and what to anticipate, as you consult with them.

Family members share genetic traits, of course, and those markers are key indicators of what a medical practitioner can expect in treating any patient. In addition, families often share common backgrounds, environments, and lifestyles… those factors combine to further predict what “runs in the family.”

Ailments tend to make repeat appearances in family members from generation to generation. Some predictably appear in just about every generation, and some maladies tend to “skip” generations.

One great example is the advantage your doctors have if they know your mother or grandmother had, say, breast cancer. If so, it doesn’t mean you’ll automatically contract the disease, but it does mean your doctors will want to be on heightened alert. They may well ask you to be examined with greater frequency than you otherwise might be.

Diabetes, lung diseases, heart conditions, and many forms of cancer follow these predictable patterns through family generations. And in almost every case, early detection is the key to defeating them, or curtailing their most disastrous effects.


Three Generations Of Medical History

Most experts agree – and your family doctors will likely concur – that the best family medical history contains information about three generations in the family.

This is because of the ailments that tend to skip generations; also, it’s helpful for doctors to be able to spot trends that may be forming in the family.

As best you can, collect information on parents, grandparents, children (and grandchildren if applicable), as well as siblings and their families (nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, and cousins).

The best way to gather much of this information is to simply ask your relatives about their family medical history. And, of course, some information is difficult or nearly impossible to get. But the more information you can supply, the better chance your family medical practitioners have to help you live longer and with more vitality.

Get the basic stuff, if you can: sex, date of birth, ethnicity, and any known allergies. Then, if possible, find out about specific medical conditions. If you can, try to discover at what age a family member was diagnosed with a given medical condition.

Find out about mental health issues, including substance and alcohol abuse. Anything you can discover about lifestyle habits, too (exercise, nutrition, tobacco use, etc.) could be helpful.

And for relatives who’ve passed away, it would be helpful to know their age at the time of death, and the cause of death, if you can find it.

Some of these data can be collected from public records, such as birth and death records.

Also, in this age of ancestry research, it’s becoming much more common to find relatives you never knew you had… if for no other reason, it might be handy to connect with those “long lost relatives” just to learn what you can about their part of the medical family tree.


Give your family medical practitioners every bit of information you can on your family’s medical history. It’s all kept in the strictest of confidence, and you never know which “nugget” of information will help a family member in a true hour of need. This research requires an investment of time and effort, but it’s an investment that’s likely to pay great dividends.

After learning more about family doctors, their importance, and the conditions they treat,
don't put your health on the back burner another day. Get started finding the right primary care
doctor for you today!