Last week, I just happened to be watching the Today Show Health segment in which their NBC News Chief Medical Editor, Dr. Nancy Snyderman was discussing knowing what diseases are in your family and how that information can predict your risk in getting certain diseases.
Her comment was based on a recent report from the Cleveland Clinic that knowing your family’s health history is more reliable than genetic testing. That makes sense to me but that isn’t what attracted my attention, it was her comment that she hired a private detective to find out about her adoptive daughter’s health history.
The private detective basically went out and put together a health history of her daughter’s birth parents and birth grandparents. She said, she felt she owed to her to provide a landscape of her medical history.
Wow, it never occurred to me to go down this route. I know almost nothing about my daughter’s birth parent’s medical history. I thought just doing genetic testing would be enough to just figure out how to manage any long-term health issues that may come up.
That said, I have some issues with actually hiring a private detective to do a background check even if I thought this was in my daughter’s best interest. Wouldn’t my daughter ask how I found this information out at some point? At what point would I have to tell her that I had done this? It seems like a time-bomb to me.
Wondering what others think about going down this path.
