Bring invisible symptoms to life with a symptom map
The short story: we at Pictal Health made a free symptom map template in Google Slides. You can use it to communicate better with your doctors. Try it!
Explaining your symptoms can be mentally challenging, emotionally fraught, and just plain hard.
We’ve all been there. You’re waiting in a beige room staring at a poster of a pouchy GI tract, or perhaps a colorful 3D model of the ear canal, when your *doctor walks in and says “what’s going on?”
(*In this article, every use of ‘doctor’ also means clinician, medical provider, PA, nurse practitioner, and all the other people who might diagnose and treat you.)
You say whatever comes to mind first, and sometimes that’s enough — especially for simple, short-term issues like a suspected broken bone.
But for those of us with complex, chronic, ever-changing symptoms, not to mention invisible symptoms, it’s challenging to bring to life how our bodies feel.
Let’s say you have 20 different symptoms. It would be a mental feat to remember them all on the spot, and nearly impossible to have the time to describe each one in detail.
Even if you did have the time and mental capacity to detail your symptoms verbally, it would be practically impossible for your doctor to retain and make use of that information.
That’s because problems of memory and attention affect all of us, patients and doctors alike. As humans, we can only retain about the last 4 things or 30 seconds of anything we’ve heard or seen in our short-term, ‘working’ memory. So a doctor listening to a complex set of symptoms is bound to lose track of some of them; they escape the mind, like water through a sieve.