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I'd like to ask the following question somewhere on StackExchange, and this site looks like the best fit. Is it on topic? Is it too opinion-based or survey-like? Could I make it more on-topic?

Assembling a general-purpose family medical history

In the US, when seeing a new doctor for the first time, one is asked to fill out medical information forms that usually include questions about family medical history. Unfortunately, I barely know my family's medical history, so I'm planning on asking someone who does know and writing everything down. However, I don't have any medical forms in front of me right now, and I can't recall what questions are generally asked about my family medical history.

Hence: What data about family medical history is most commonly/generally requested by doctor intake forms? Specifically:

  • Which medical and/or psychiatric diagnoses are typically asked about?

  • How distant should the relatives be? I know the last form like this I filled out specified it wanted my grandparents and anyone descended from them. Is that a common requirement?

  • I'd like to be able to show this document to medical staff, so it can't just list my relatives' names, as they don't know who those people are. Would just listing relations like "uncle" and "grandmother" be enough? Should I specify whether each relative is on my mother's side or my father's side? Should I specify cousins' sex/gender?

  • Besides just diagnoses, is there any other aspect of family medical history I should generally know?

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  • I just saw this question. Might I suggest you walk into your primary care provider's office and simply ask for a new patient medical history form? Or, google medical history forms and look at a few examples? Also, please note that pertinent family history (FH) changes for different specialties (for example, most forms won't ask about any family members having sustained atraumatic vertebral compression fractures, but I was recently amused by an intake form with many such unusual FH questions, and this was only for a run of the mill test. Commented Jun 15 at 21:31

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My personal opinion (not intending to offer a binding moderator opinion) is that the question is too broad. A good hint at that is the number of sub-questions you found necessary to elaborate: although you've been able to summarize them with a one-sentence heading, it's actually a very broad question consisting of many different directions.

We've made the name of the site here medical sciences intentionally, to be clear that the focus of this site is on science rather than medical advice (which is strictly off-topic). That said, I would say we also interpret this rather broadly and allow questions that range outside human biology to include more practical study including public health and medical communication and the administrative practice of medicine, to the extent that it can be studied empirically.

I think several of your sub-questions could be made useful and on-topic here if they were to focus more on science rather than the perspective of a patient. There are many publications about medical histories, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q="family+medical+history" is perhaps a starting point.

From a patient's perspective, I suppose it seems useful to consider that if you have any questions you can certainly ask them of your physician, and that if your physician wanted to provide more detailed instructions up front they could have. I would also consider that family medical history is not a "one-time chance": physicians are likely to ask further and more specifically when particular symptoms arise, for example.

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  • +1 but, ugh, please don't advise asking [their] doctor. The whole point of intake forms is to save the doctor time, which has become so limited that the system is almost non-functional. It's easier to just get a form and go from there. Commented Jun 15 at 21:38

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