Paid promotion
I have reached the age where I have health admin.
Nothing especially dramatic, thankfully. I’m not spending my afternoons rattling around hospital waiting rooms or organising my medication into one of those little plastic boxes marked MON TUE WED. But there just seems to be an increasing number of small, tedious things that I’m supposed to be keeping track of.
There’s HRT, and remembering when I started it and when I’m supposed to have a review, and when I need my coil replaced. (GAH!). There’s acid reflux, potentially causing the chronic cough I’ve had on and off for years. Oh but that could also be asthma, so just huff into this monitor twice a day and record the results. There’s a steroid nasal spray. There are various appointments and conversations with the GP, and things I’m meant to try for a few weeks and then remember whether or not they made any difference.
The problem is that I am not naturally a person who excels at maintenance. This applies across all areas of my life. I once dealt with a warning light on the dashboard of my car by putting a satsuma in front of it so I couldn’t see it. This worked extremely well, right up until the point when the power steering stopped working.
I have historically taken a similar approach to my body. I’m not deliberately irresponsible, I just find ongoing monitoring incredibly boring. If something hurts, instinct is to ignore it. If somebody says, ‘Use this every day for six weeks and make a note of whether your symptoms improve’, my brain apparently hears, ‘Use this enthusiastically for four days, forget about it for a fortnight and then look blank when someone asks how you’ve been getting on.’
The problem is that I am not naturally a person who excels at maintenance.
As I get older though, I’m realising this probably isn’t a sustainable healthcare strategy. I don’t necessarily need to become a completely different person, but I would like to get better at keeping a record of things as they happen, so that when a doctor asks me when something started, or what medication I was taking at the time, I don’t have to gaze thoughtfully into the middle distance and say, ‘Hmmm. Maybe March?’
Which is where Biojrnl comes in.
Biojrnl is a new health journal app designed essentially as a private place to keep a record of all the boring-but-important health information.
You can record symptoms as they happen, medications you’re taking, appointments, vaccinations and test results, which means rather than trying to reconstruct your medical history from half-remembered conversations and random text messages, you have everything together in one place.
I really like the idea of this because it feels different from a lot of health apps. It’s not trying to diagnose me, turn my body into a series of performance metrics or tell me that if I just optimise my morning routine I could live to 137. It’s basically saying: Here’s somewhere nice to write things down so you remember them. It’s all your own language, nothing fancy, just a place to make notes that you can show your GP as required.
That I can manage.
It also looks lovely, which might sound like a ridiculous thing to care about in a health app, but I absolutely do. Health admin already feels clinical and tedious enough without having to do it in an app that looks like an NHS procurement database. Biojrnl has deliberately been designed to feel warm, simple and friendly, which makes the whole business of logging your steroid nasal spray marginally less depressing.
Here’s somewhere nice to write things down so you remember them.
One of the things that stood out to me about Biojrnl was the approach to privacy. Your information stays on your own phone unless you actively choose to turn on backup. There’s no AI reading through your symptoms or medical notes, there are no ads popping up because you happened to mention acid reflux, and your information isn’t being sold on to anyone.
Given how personal the things you might want to record are, that feels important. There’s also a free plan with no time limit on it, so you don’t have to immediately commit to yet another subscription just to find out whether keeping a health journal is something that works for you.
The other feature I can see becoming increasingly useful, which is part of the Family and Care plans, is the ability to create separate records for people you look after. For example, I could keep a record for my mum as she gets older. Even better, those records can be shared with siblings or carers, with quite precise controls over what each person is allowed to see.
This feels particularly useful when you reach that stage with parents where several people are involved in helping out and everyone vaguely thinks somebody else knows when the next appointment is.
My mum and I are, unfortunately, equally hopeless at remembering this sort of thing, so between us we could probably attend an entire series of medical appointments and emerge with absolutely no idea what anybody had said. Having one place to record things at the time – medication changes, appointments, test results, symptoms we want to mention next time – feels like a genuinely practical way to avoid that.
Can Biojrnl turn me into a responsible adult?
This remains to be seen. What I like about the idea of Biojrnl, though, is that it doesn’t require me to suddenly become somebody who owns a filing cabinet and knows the exact date of her last tetanus vaccination. It just gives me somewhere to put information when it comes up.
Peak flow reading? Pop it in.
New medication? Pop it in.
GP appointment? Make a quick note afterwards while I can still remember what was said.
Weird cough suddenly worse? Record it, rather than assuming I’ll definitely remember when it started three months later.
It’s a very small habit, but I can see how over a year or two it could build into something incredibly useful – an actual timeline of what you’ve recorded, rather than a collection of vague memories. I’m hoping it might make me a little more proactive too. Not obsessively tracking every twinge or turning myself into a full-time medical project, but paying enough attention to remember what I wrote down and when, and follow things through properly.
Because apparently I am now at an age where ignoring warning lights is no longer an adequate maintenance plan. For cars or bodies. And if Biojrnl can stop me metaphorically putting a satsuma in front of either of them, I’ll consider that progress.
Biojrnl is available on Android and iOS. Download it now and give it a try.