A lovely young friend of mine – adoptee from Korea, mother, wife, dedicated social worker and friend to many – passed away over the weekend. She was just past 40, far too young to leave this life.

What took her was cancer, as is the case with many, diagnosed too late to give her more than a reprieve from the worst. She fought it like a Trojan and lived every last minute she reclaimed to the very fullest. What an inspiration she was and always will be!

I know the cancer that took my friend. It took my aunt far too young as well. Her children are at risk, too, but knowing my aunt's history has put them under medicine’s watchful eye, which will allow any asymptomatic disease they might experience to be identified and treated early. My friend never had that chance.

Even when the outcome may not be life-threatening, medical history may save an adoptee from long and arduous medical testing of the "shooting in the dark" variety. I watched one of my children go through this, blessedly to a positive outcome, and often wonder if a little medical history might have shortened that experience.

And so I make a plea that has been on my list of “things we could do right now to improve adoption” for a long time: Do everything you can to obtain as much medical history as you can from placing mothers and fathers.

Don’t participate in “drop box” adoptions that enable secrecy. Don’t let notions of “birthmother privacy” stop you. Don’t think, as many do, that medical histories are unimportant, or that knowing one’s medical history is no guarantee of health, or that placing mothers and fathers may not really know their families’ medical histories anyway.

We've let red herrings stand in the way of this simple change in adoption practice for too long, sometimes with devastating consequence. So just get as much information as you can and pass it on to the adoptee and adoptive family. There are no guarantees that medical history will save any of us from anything, but it could be the very clue to a troubling symptom that gets a doctor searching in the right direction and gives an adoptee's health a better chance. Why wouldn't all of us want that?