To do your own symptoms check, you have to be a health detective for yourself.
In order to solve the clue of your health problem, you need to ask yourself the right questions to tackle the reasons in a reasonable and systematic way.
You will need to follow particular steps to come out with an acceptable result for your health check, these steps include:

1. Timing related questions.
   
2. Project your results to health problems.
   
3. Using your medical history and knowledge for clues.
   
4. Thinking of other related issues.
   

We will talk now about the first step which is 'Timing'.
Knowing the timeline of your symptoms can help you decide the cause behind these symptoms; this is obvious in cases like headache or tiredness.
All you need to do is asking yourself some questions related to the "First show", "Circumstances", "Frequency", "Duration" and "Progression" of the symptoms.
First show: you will ask yourself questions like, what's the start time when you first had this problem, or were these symptoms sudden or you started feeling gradually; a sudden pain in the knee while playing football is very much different from a gradual increase in the pain over a long time scale.
Circumstances: you need to ask yourself something like, where were you when the problem started or what you were doing; having a terrible stomach ache or vomiting after a meal point towards a food poisoning.
Another question might be, did you do anything different to what you normally do; sometimes the history of the past few hours or days to the symptoms may have a direct relation to what you feel.
Frequency: how often you feel the symptoms if it is not consistent; a headache that is frequent on separate time frames would have a different indication than a consistent headache for long time.
Duration: questions of duration are so much complementary to the frequency questions, how long do your symptoms last or how long are the periods when you don't have any symptoms.
Progression: is the last thing to know to complete your investigation regarding the timing of your symptoms.
How your symptoms have developed over time, or are they getting worse and how quickly, are examples of such questions.
The next step is projecting the results of this timing survey to real health problems, trying to reach a reasonable match.
This would be our next article.