Up front, so it does not get lost: this text is not medical advice, and RecTake is not a medical device. The app checks no interactions, recommends no dosage and does not judge whether a preparation is right for you. It records what you tell it. Everything beyond that belongs with a doctor or a pharmacist.
Nearly every appointment with a doctor or a pharmacist contains the same question, and nearly everyone answers it badly:
“Are you taking anything else?”
The honest answer is usually: “Er — magnesium. And vitamin D, I think. And something for the immune system that is in the cupboard at home.” That is not sloppiness. It is the normal performance of memory faced with a question nobody prepared for.
What is actually being asked
It is never one question. It is five, and they come in this order:
| The question | Why it is asked |
|---|---|
| What exactly? | The brand name is often not enough — what matters is the substance and the preparation. |
| How much, how often? | “Magnesium” can be 100 mg or 600 mg. That is not the same conversation. |
| Since when? | Whether something has been running for three days or three years changes how everything after it is read. |
| When last? | Before some tests and procedures that is precisely the decisive detail. |
| What changed? | Newly added, dropped, dose changed — and when. |
All five ask about the past. None of them can be worked out in the moment of asking; they can only be looked up or recalled. And recall is systematically unreliable here — you remember the unusual and forget the ordinary, even though the ordinary is what has been acting every single day.
Why supplements are the part that goes missing
Prescribed medication is on a plan. Supplements are on no plan. They are bought in a drugstore, taken out of a kitchen cupboard and filed mentally under “not really medication” — which is why they often do not get mentioned when medication is asked about.
That is exactly why RecTake keeps supplements and medication as two separate entry types in the same history. What acted together then appears together — instead of being split between a head and a cupboard.
What a diary answers
A kept history answers the five questions factually rather than from memory:
- What and how much — every entry carries its quantity and its time, as it was made.
- Since when — the first entry for a preparation is the start, and it can be found.
- When last — the last entry is the last entry. No mental arithmetic.
- What changed — the week and month views show when something arrived or stopped.
- And, often underrated: what else was going on. Food, drinks, caffeine and mood sit in the same history. Not as a diagnosis, as context.
What a diary expressly does not answer
This is where it ends, and we would rather be blunter than necessary, because the damage happens at this boundary.
- No interaction check. RecTake will not tell you that two things do not go together. That is not a missing feature but a deliberate limit: an automatic check would be a health statement about a specific case, and that belongs to someone with a licence, not in a diary app.
- No dosage advice. The app never suggests an amount and never judges whether an amount is too high.
- No diagnosis, no interpretation. If you felt unwell three days running and started something new on the same days, the history shows both side by side. It does not say that one is because of the other — and neither should you.
The last point matters most. A pattern is not proof. You are the only participant, nobody controls the conditions, and you know what you expect. That is enough to convince yourself. What a history can do is more modest and still useful: it turns a hunch into a question you can ask.
In practice: what to bring to the conversation
- Write the question down beforehand. “Could this be because of X?” is a better opening than “I have been feeling sick a lot lately”.
- Bring the period, not the single incident. The month view shows what is routine and what is the exception.
- Mention the boring things too. Coffee, the vitamin you have taken for years, the painkiller from the week before last. That is exactly what most conversations are missing.
- Say what you do not know. “I only started writing this down three weeks ago” is useful information, not an apology.
To take along: In Settings under “Your data” you can export the history as a text file – day by day, with time, amount and mood. It goes through the share sheet to yourself or straight to the practice. We never see it.
Whose data it is
Yours, and not just as a feeling. Your entries live in a database on your phone and are not transmitted to us. We cannot look at them and cannot hand them over — not on request, not on a court order. We simply do not have them.
Who sees them is decided by you, in the moment you hold your phone out to someone. With health data that is not a detail, it is the whole point. The voice recording no longer leaves the device either — since 11 September 2026 the phone’s operating system turns it into text. Why the route out was torn down is described in Where your voice recording goes.