An Experiment in Personal Healthcare Protocols

What happened?

A little while back, I was involved in a motorcycle accident. It wasn’t a very bad one, relatively, but it certainly wasn’t easy.

The journey that ensued involved a whole cast of characters: A primary care physician, a pharmacist, a massage therapist, a chiropractor, and a physical therapist. People who know a lot more than I did telling me a lot about what I should be doing to fix my injury.

But when you’re injured, the last thing you want to worry about is the overhead of managing an injury.

From a logistics standpoint, you have to tie all of the instructions together that each provider is telling you. From a learning standpoint, talking to care providers can be like taking a series of mini lectures. New domains of information to understand and ramp-up on. Listening, asking questions. All while sharp/dull/spicy pains are charging down the right side of your torso.

Sprinkle in the personal research you do in your own time. For instance, I decided to take a chance on supplements like Cissus quadrangularis, which has very little research attached to it, but is supposed to aid in ligament repair.

So the healthcare list grew, and so I sought a solution. Inspired by recipe books, motorcycle repair manuals, and lab research protocols, I tied everything they told me together into a simple one-pager.

It looked something like this:

What was the result?

When my doctor saw it, he about jumped out of his seat and asked for a copy to keep. Hopefully something comes of that.

For myself, the protocol became the one go-to resource that helped me in the early stages. It reduced cognitive effort, and became a way to keep myself accountable.

As the healing process progressed into later stages, I didn’t quite keep it up-to-date. And I didn’t always follow the protocol to a T, either — maybe 70% of the protocol was actually adhered to.

Furthermore, it didn’t capture cycles at the week and month level, only the day level. This was particularly important for physical therapy exercises, where the tasks can change and intensify from week-to-week and month-to-month. Also for medicine, with dosage levels that ideally trend downward.

What can we learn from this?

• Having healthcare plans tied together into one location may improve the odds that they’re adhered to.
• Categorizing each task by its purpose was hugely informative. For example, “Reducing Swelling” and “Rebuilding Tissue” are often tossed aside in lieu of the broader notion of “Kill the Pain.”
• Turning this into an actual daily checklist may have increased adherence.
• Time cycles can be hard to keep track of, and this can be an antidote. Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Weekly, and Monthly healthcare tasks.
• Quantities! Sometimes they’re hard to remember. Lists like this can help.
• Qualitative tasks, like “meditate” and “avoid movement at the hips” should be explicitly described in any healthcare plan.

All in all, you could say it’s just a simple tool to help cope with the complex maze of personal healthcare.