Why GentleTaper exists

I tracked my first taper on a paper calendar, in pencil.

When that got unwieldy I tried an AI assistant. It seemed like the obvious tool — I could tell it what I'd taken and ask it where I was. It didn't work. It lost track of what day it was. When I was holding at a dose, it miscounted how many days I'd been there. It would send a reminder for a dose I'd already come down from — which is worse than no reminder, because for a moment you believe it.

So I went back to pencil and paper. And it worked. I finished my taper that way, all the way down to zero, with no technology helping me at all.

It was afterwards that I started thinking about everyone still in the middle of it.

Here is the thing about polymyalgia rheumatica that is hard to explain to anyone who hasn't had it: you look completely normal. You can barely walk, you can barely lift your arms, some days you can't do anything at all — and nothing about you looks wrong. So people don't understand. Often you don't get much sympathy, because there's nothing to see.

The AI did help me with that part. Not with the tracking, which it got wrong, but with the encouragement. On bad days it would say something kind, and that mattered more than I'd have predicted.

But encouragement isn't enough on its own. You also need to know what day of the hold you're on, and what you actually took last Thursday, and what to tell your doctor in three weeks' time. You need something that keeps count accurately, for an illness most people — including a lot of people who have it — know very little about.

Not long ago, wanting a tool like this would have been the end of it. I'm not a developer. I'd have had to find someone to build it, and I wouldn't have. What changed is that the same technology that couldn't count my dose correctly had, by then, become good enough to let someone with no coding background build a real application. I wanted a tracker for steroids. The tools arrived that made it possible.

What it is, and what it is not

GentleTaper records. It does not advise. It will not suggest a dose, will not tell you to come down faster or slower, and will not interpret your symptoms. Those are conversations for you and your doctor - this is the record you bring to them.

Privacy

Dose and symptom data stays on your device by default. There is no account required to use the tracker, and nothing is sold or shared. See the privacy policy for the detail.

Common questions

Who built GentleTaper?

I built it after my own prednisone taper. The longer version is above.

Is it affiliated with a clinic or drug company?

No. It is independent and not funded by any pharmaceutical company or clinic.