The situation
Alex is 34 and has fibromyalgia and ME/CFS. The diagnosis took years. Specialist appointments are short and months apart, and by the time Alex is in the room, the last bad fortnight has blurred into "it's been rough". Alex works, and would rather no employer ever saw any of this.
Set it up once
Do this on a good day. It takes about ten minutes.
- Create one profile. Only a name is required. There's no account and no email address.
- Add your conditions. Search the catalogue for "fibromyalgia", select it, then pick the symptoms you actually get from the list below it: fatigue, brain fog, joint pain. These become shortcuts, so logging one later is a tap and a severity. If a condition or symptom isn't there, add your own.
- Add your medications. Mark each as scheduled or as needed. Supplements get their own list.
- Choose the optional trackers. Weather, cycle, and bowel tracking are all off until you turn them on. Only turn on what you'd want to see in a report.
On a bad day
Tap +. The keyboard is already up. Type it the way you'd text a friend:
- "Brain fog again, hard to focus"
- "Took ibuprofen at noon"
- "Slept 6 hours, woke up twice"
Health Flare suggests what kind of entry it is (a symptom, a dose, a night's sleep) and you can change it before saving. Doses match against the medications you added, so a medicine it doesn't know about is saved as a journal note instead. That's the whole entry. Severity and notes can wait until you have the energy, or never.
If it's a flare, tap "Is Alex flaring?" on the dashboard. Everything you log until you end the flare is tagged to it, so later you can open that flare and see what the week actually looked like.
Missing a day is fine. Charts show a gap, not a zero, so a day you couldn't log never looks like a good day.
On a better day
Do the slower things.
- The daily check-in. A wellbeing score from 1 to 10, and stress if you want. One a day is enough. This is what the wellbeing trend is built from.
- Activity and rest. Log activity with an effort level from 1 to 5, and log rest days too. With ME/CFS the crash often comes a day or two after the effort, so it helps to have both on the record.
- Rate your doses. After an as-needed dose, mark whether it helped a lot, helped a little, did nothing, or made things worse. After a few weeks, the medication's detail page shows the pattern.
- Write it down. If the journal is how you process a hard week, use it. Mood and energy are optional.
Before the appointment
A week out:
- Add the appointment and write your questions. In the room, tick them off as you go, so the one you came in for doesn't get lost.
- Open Insights for the last 30 days. Look at your symptom trends, whether bad nights are followed by worse days, and any meals you flagged.
- Export a report. Pick the date range and the data types. A specialist for fibromyalgia probably wants symptoms, sleep, and medications, not every meal. Share the PDF or print it.
Afterwards, record what the doctor said, any medication changes, and the follow-up date. Next time, that's where you start.
Keeping it private
Your records live on your phone, and in your phone's own iCloud or Google backup if you use one. There's no account and no Health Flare server to send it to. If you don't use phone backups, export a backup from Settings before you change phones, and lock it with a password.
Weather tracking is the one feature that uses the network. When it's on, the app sends your approximate location to Open-Meteo to get the local weather. None of your health data goes with it. It's off unless you turn it on.