My Pain Diary App Helps Users Manage Chronic Pain

It’s hard to tell whether the prevalence of chronic pain issues in this day and age is related to an increase in injuries, illnesses, and diseases with lasting side effects or if it is simply more widely diagnosed than it was in decades past, but the rising number of reports has certainly resulted in greater awareness of chronic pain conditions, as well as new research associated with it and treatments for those who suffer from ongoing issues with pain. Still, most people who are diagnosed with chronic pain conditions such as fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, endometriosis, chronic headaches or migraines, Crohn’s disease, Lupus, MS, or even ongoing back pain will find that getting diagnosed is just the beginning of a long journey towards health and wellness. Most chronic pain conditions have no cure, but they can certainly be managed in a variety of ways. And nearly every path to pain-free living starts with tracking pain symptoms. The My Pain Diary application for the iPhone and iPad is designed to help you do just that with an assortment of useful tools.

In fact, the myriad features are so comprehensive that you may have a difficult time figuring out where to get started. However, a good place to begin is with your history, and this might include entering the dates of past visits with doctors and documenting the symptoms listed in their reports. Of course, you could also simply start fresh by creating a new entry for today, and start tracking your history of symptoms from here on out. This feature allows you to track unlimited conditions, so if you have more than one, such as migraines and digestive issues, you can enter data pertaining to your many ailments in one place. While this is certainly handy, the major benefit is that you can cross-reference symptoms to see if flare-ups in one condition coincide with issues in another area. In short, it’s a great way to spot trends and correlations that exist between your chronic pain (or other) conditions.

Further, each new entry provides you with a slew of options for taking note of anything and everything that could be exacerbating your chronic pain. For example, keeping track not only of the area and intensity of pain, but also your mood and your eating, sleeping, and exercise habits could help you to discover triggers that you didn’t know existed, or alternately, environmental factors and activities that tend to reduce pain symptoms. The app even comes with a built-in weather tracker to let you know if the climate is affecting your condition. You can also attach photos to track skin conditions or environmental factors more easily.

Once you’ve been keeping track of your pain for a while, you can start to use the graph functionality to see your data in a different way. You can input up to three metrics at once (as well as the weather metric) in order to cross-reference your data and hopefully spot trends that will help you to figure out what could be contributing to high-pain days. And you can create reports based on the data you’ve entered as a way to keep your doctors up-to-date on your chronic pain condition. Of course, this app won’t provide you with treatments to ease your symptoms; you’ll have to look for pain management in Los Angeles or your local area for that. But it could offer you clues as to what your triggers are and how to lessen chronic pain. For a download price of $4.99, that’s a steal.