If you have a chronic illness or live with daily chronic pain you are physician may have requested for you to keep a diary of your pain levels so that he can monitor what activities or influences in your life can increase your level of pain. He may have recommended that you also record your sleep patterns and even your diet
If you try to do this, however, you may have found it to be a cumbersome and overwhelming task. Despite this, the information that you collect by keeping a pain log can be extremely helpful in helping you and your doctor or locate what it is that could be caused in an increase of inflammation in for an extreme flare up of your illness.
Ironically, while those of us with pain may find it hard to write down what we are doing, eating, and how we are medicating, other people are on Twitter and are recording what they ate for breakfast, how they are recovering from a cold, and when they are up working at 3 a.m. in the morning. . . and thinking it is fun!
If you have a chronic illness, Twitter can be an amazing tool to use as a pain diary. This social networking tool has been successfully used to help people maintain logs on their diet, exercise, and even the commitment to stop smoking. Why should we not use it to keep accurate records of our chronic illness and pain levels?
Here are 5 steps to use Twitter to understand the causes your pain:
[1] Create an account at Twitter just for your chronic pain logs. If you already have a Twitter account, make a new one, and let it remain private. If you look under “settings” you will see the option to make your account private, meaning that you will have to approve any followers before anyone can see your Twitter account. Since this is private medical information, we recommend not approving anyone. If you are already Twittering this can seem a bit strange because you typically want to increase the number of followers.
[2] You are now ready to start writing your posts. You cannot write more than 140 characters, however, this keeps it a simple task and not too overwhelming. Feel free to use it in any way necessary, for example, submitting more than one post to describe a special circumstance. You can send posts from your cell phone, not just from the computer, so set up this option in your account to make the most of it.
[3] Remember to post at the very least any major events that are not part of your typical day and your body’s response to them. For example a post may include how you woke up feeling, major weather influences, if you took extra medication, or if you are active or solitary during the day. You can post whatever information may be of value to you at some point.
[4] Before your doctor’s appointment log on to Twitter and print out the pages if your doctor would like a copy of them. Highlight any major activities that could have created ups and downs in your pain level.
[5] If you already use twitter for personal or business reasons, consider using a service that will post to more than one account at a time so that you are regular tweets that share where you are and what you are doing can also post to your twitter chronic pain log without any additional effort.
While there are bound to be some fancy applications for Twitter or other pain log tools in the future of Web 2.0 medicine, with a simple private Twitter account you can start keeping your illness records in just a few minutes at no cost. It’s times like this we love the internet.
Tags: Chronic Pain, Medical Information, Followers, Overwhelming Task
