Personal Side Effect Log

What the Side Effect Log does

The Personal Side Effect Log is a private journal for tracking how you feel on a medication over time. It is aimed at people on hormone therapy (HRT), GLP-1 medications, or any prescription where side effects show up day to day. You pick a symptom, set how bad it was, add an optional note, and the entry is saved with today's date. There is no account, no login, and no data collection.

You log from a fixed list of eight symptoms on this page: Nausea, Headache, Hot flash, Sleep disruption, Mood change, GI upset, Fatigue, and Other. Severity is a 1-to-5 slider labeled Trace, Mild, Moderate, Severe, and Disabling. Every entry is stamped with the current date automatically, so the log builds a running record you can scroll back through and, over weeks, see whether a symptom is easing, holding steady, or getting worse.

The point is not to interpret your symptoms for you. It is to turn vague memory ("I think the nausea has been better lately") into a concrete list you can read out loud, or hand over, at your next appointment. It records; your prescriber interprets.

How to read your result

Two views summarize what you have logged. The Summary groups every entry by symptom and shows a count plus an average severity, rounded to the nearest label. So "Nausea - 6 entries, avg Mild" means you logged nausea six times and the typical rating rounded to Mild. This is a plain arithmetic mean of your own ratings, nothing more, so a couple of very bad days can pull the average up even if most days were fine.

The Recent entries list shows your ten most recent logs with the symptom, severity label, date, and any note, newest first. Older entries beyond the ten shown still count toward the Summary; they are just not displayed in that list. You can delete any visible entry with Remove, which permanently drops it from the log and recalculates the Summary.

Treat the output as a conversation starter, not a verdict. A rising average or a cluster of Severe and Disabling entries is a signal to raise with your prescriber, not a diagnosis and not a reason to stop or change a dose on your own. The most useful thing you can do is bring the log to your visit so the timing, frequency, and severity come from a record instead of memory.

What the result is based on

Everything shown comes only from what you type in. Each entry stores four things: the symptom you chose, a severity from 1 to 5, an optional free-text note, and the date, which is set automatically to the day you add the entry. There is no built-in medication database, no reference ranges, and no comparison against other people.

The Summary is computed by grouping your entries by symptom and averaging the severity numbers you entered, then mapping that average back to the nearest word label (Trace, Mild, Moderate, Severe, Disabling). No weighting, trend line, or statistical model is involved. It is a count and a mean.

Entries are saved in your browser's local storage on this one device, under a single saved log. Nothing is transmitted to a server. That privacy is real, but it also means the log lives only in the browser you used: clearing site data, switching devices or browsers, or using private/incognito mode will leave you without the entries.

What it cannot tell you

• It does not know what medication you are on. Entries are not tied to a drug, dose, or start date, so the log cannot attribute a symptom to a specific medication or separate a side effect from an unrelated cause.
• Severity is entirely self-rated on a 1-to-5 scale with no calibration. Your Moderate and someone else's Moderate are not comparable, and the average can be skewed by a few extreme days.
• The symptom list is fixed to eight options; anything not listed collapses into Other, which makes the Summary for Other a mix of unrelated things.
• It stores one entry per Add action with only today's date. There is no way to backdate a missed day, log time of day, or edit an entry after saving; you can only remove and re-add.
• Data is confined to this browser on this device with no export, print, or backup feature and no sync. Clearing browser data or switching devices loses the log.
• It flags nothing. Even a run of Disabling entries produces no warning or advice; the tool cannot recognize an emergency or a serious reaction and is not a substitute for calling a clinician.