Toolkit Tuesday: Medical History and Therapy Tracking Tool

0:01 Tara Hunkin:
This is My Child Will Thrive and I'm your host, Tara Hunkin, nutritional therapy practitioner, certified GAPs practitioner, restorative wellness practitioner, and mother. I'm thrilled to share with you the latest information, tips, resources, and tools to help you on the path to recovery for your child with ADHD, autism, sensory processing disorder, or learning disabilities.

My own experiences with my daughter combined with as much training as I can get my hands on research I can dig into and conferences I can attend have helped me to develop systems and tools for parents like you who feel overwhelmed, trying to help their children. So sit back as I share another great topic to help you on your journey. A quick disclaimer, before we get started.

My Child Will Thrive is not a substitute for working with a qualified healthcare practitioner. The information provided on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat your child. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before implementing any information or treatments that you have learned about on this podcast. There are many gifted, passionate, and knowledgeable practitioners with hundreds if not thousands of hours of study and clinical experience available to help guide you.

Part of our goal is to give you the knowledge and tools you need to effectively advocate for your child so that you don't lend to implement each new treatment that comes along. No one knows your child better than you. No one knows your child's history like you do or can better judge what is normal or abnormal for your child. The greatest success in recovery comes from the parent being informed and asking the right questions and making the best decisions for their child in coordination with a team of qualified practitioners in different areas of specialty.

Today's podcast is sponsored by the Autism, ADHD and Sensory Processing Disorder Summit. In order to learn more about the summit and to sign up for free, please go to mychildwillthrive.com/summit.

2:04 Tara Hunkin:
Hello and welcome back to the My Child Will Thrive Podcast. I'm Tara Hunkin and today we have another episode of Toolkit Tuesday. Toolkit Tuesday is a day where we talk about the tools that are in your toolkit, or can be in your toolkit in order to help you on your journey with your child. Today's tool is the Medical History and Therapy Tracking Tool and although that doesn't sound very exciting, we're going to talk about why this tool is so valuable. And you can find the tool for free, i's a digital download in the My Child Will Thrive Toolkit, and you can find that at mychildwillthrive.com/toolkit.

So you can either pause this episode and go ahead and go over to get access to that toolkit and download it so you can follow along or you can obviously watch this on our website at mychildwillthrive.com so you can see what I'm showing you on the screen. If you're listening to this in your podcast player, you may want to do that or go to YouTube or in our Instagram feed,

you'll be able to find this episode of the Toolkit Tuesday with the visuals as well. Okay, so without further ado, let's talk about the tool of today. This tool is one of the very first ones I created when I started My Child Will Thrive and it was born out of the frustration that I had over the years with my daughter of I was going into a lot of different practitioners and physicians and

therapists and of course there's always that dreaded process of all the intake forms. And when I went to do those forms, I often realized that I either wasn't remembering everything as easily as I was before, especially once I had more than one child or a time had passed. Sometimes I was smart enough to have actually kept a copy of what I was submitting to them.

Sometimes I didn't, I had to go back into my records and it was very time-consuming. And what you learn from this process with your child is that there is extreme value in the accuracy and the level of detail of this medical history that you can give to each practitioner because through their skilled eyes and their years of clinical experience, they can note many different patterns or possible underlying root causes or opportunities to do things differently and to help your child in a different way.

Or to validate what you're doing and keep you on track and move it forward even more. So this is why keeping a detailed and complete medical history is really important. So what I did was I took medical history forms and intakes from a number of different practitioners that we worked with over the years and started to compile and create one master document with all the information that you are often asked repetitively,

or maybe in a different way from all these practitioners that you may be working with with your child. You can fill out the form that I've created and keep it there. Sometimes practitioners will even let you submit it to them directly. Otherwise it's a quick place for you to go back and just remember all the key things in the medical history. It is a pretty extensive medical history.

It probably will continue to change over time so it's always good to go back and check to see if there's a newer version of it available, because I like to tweak things and add things in when we learn from new practitioners about the types of things they're looking for when looking at medical history. But it really is that one document you can go to

for when your memory fails you, which I know mine has many a time. So I've grabbed three pages. Like I said, it's a very extensive document. I think it's probably close to 40 pages and the reason for that is often we're having to update it and some of the pages are repetitive in there, but it changes all the time.

6:21 Tara Hunkin:
So obviously the first page of it is what I'm showing now, for those of you that are listening and not watching it really is just that first page of where you're starting to write down those basic details for your practitioner. And then it goes into, we start into the mother's medical history, including conception, pregnancy, and delivery information.

The mother and father's medical history is very key to understanding our children's history in terms of how they came to be and the development, because all those things can impact their neuro-development and their health and wellbeing moving forward. So the more information even of that you have for your practitioners, the better they'll be able to identify those opportunities as I mentioned before.

So it starts out with things like that. The other types of things that we're going to be gathering in there, and you can see actually on this page, I've just flipped to another one on the mother's medical history, it really is quite detailed. Sometimes we find these things tedious to do, but like I said before,

if you do it once and you have it all in one place, it really is just a matter of copying it over if you have to fill out somebody else's form, but the importance of this information and it being accurate is essential to doing great work with the practitioners that you work with and finding the right opportunities for your child.

One of the first things that I learned from when I did the training through the Medical Academy of Pediatric Special Needs was from Dr. Sidney Baker and he talked about his lengthy intake process. I believe what he said is he spends about an hour and a half with each, at least, with each new patient that had come into his practice because he really wants to get to know them and get to know all of these details. He not only has them fill out the forms and goes through the forms.

He also had learned over the years that really once you have that information, it's those data points that will come together and really guide where they'll want to take you on the journey of finding out the right treatments and therapies for your child. So you're going to be gathering all that information about the mother, the father, and then, and things like you're going to get into the milestones.

So the milestones, your developmental milestones that your child had and what age and any anomalies you might've seen and everything else. And as we've talked about it before milestones matter. We know that if a child is either advanced or they regress, or they're delayed in their milestones, that's going to impact further development in the brain and it can hold them back from being the best version of themselves moving forward.

There will be details like that. There's also going to be, obviously, you're going to be collecting all the information about all the treatments and therapies you've done so far with your child. And if you're familiar with the Toolkit already, you will know that we have some other tools that you can use to continue to build on that medical history

and you'll just be able to slide them into your binder and add them to this as well. But if you have done things that you haven't previously recorded on some of the other trackers that we have in the Toolkit, then this is your opportunity to gather them all in one place in their medical history form so you can bring it to the next appointment you have with your practitioners.

9:50 Tara Hunkin:
So that's pretty much it. Once again, tools like this are the tools that you can use to set yourself up for success with your child. When we take the time to pull all this information together, and for most of it requires binders of information over the years. But when you take the time to do that, you will have the information that you need in order for you to make forward progress faster with your child

So it's worth investing the time and energy in it right now. You can find this tool, the Medical History and Therapy Tracking Tool in the My Child Will Thrive Toolkit for free at mychildwillthrive.com/toolkit. It is a total resource library of all the tools in there, including cheat sheets, tracking tools, and more. I highly recommend you download them and most of them are actually, you can either print them out and fill them out, or you can save them under another name and then start to fill them out, even digitally on your computer if you prefer. I hope this has been helpful and I look forward to bringing you another tool from the Toolkit sometime near in the future. Have a great day.

11:04 Tara Hunkin:
So that's a wrap. Thanks for joining me this week on My Child Will Thrive. I'm so passionate about giving you the tools and information you need to help your child recover. And as they say, it takes a village. So join us in the My Child Will Thrive village Facebook group, where you can meet like-minded parents and stay up to date on everything we have going on at My Child Will Thrive. This is Tara Hunkin, and I'll catch you on the next podcast or over at mychildwillthrive.com.