How to track pain with Symptom Diary

Why you might want to read this article

Sometimes when you have continuous chronic pain you do not get it seriously for a long time. Once it becomes more severe or lasts for a really long time, you go to the doctor.

Since the pain disturbs you for a long time you don’t really remember when it started, how often and how severe it is per day, was it better or worse in the beginning. It becomes much harder for doctors to diagnose you, and increases the probability of wrong way for diagnosis/treatment.

All these problems can be addressed by using the right health tracker or so called symptom diary.

Today we will talk about how to track your pain during the treatment and even before. How to ensure you don't overlook the time for your doctor's appointment. How to detect improvements to your health and give feedback to your doctor about the treatment.

How I used symptom tracker when I had gastritis

Back in the day I had chronic problems with stomach and digestion. Since the pain is not severe, I just went over it and forgot. In the end, I realized that I have had problems with my stomach for years and didn’t go to the doctor, because I thought it was something temporary.

After one of the visits I realized I didn’t mention a couple of important cases that might be useful for diagnosis just because I forgot.

Besides that, sometimes I’m lost with questions about my pain, for instance, “what exactly hurts you, where, how frequently?”. For sure as any human being I’m answering with the most recent memories, which might be not accurate because I’m telling the most recent events and forgot about past events

Another thing was to detect treatment efficiency. I might answer these questions inaccurately because I just had a bad diet or stress, that adds up to the pain and it feels worse, however the pills and medications actually help.

I started my symptoms or pains diary by taking notes in my physical notebook. I realized that it won’t work for me. There are a lot of cases when I don’t have a notebook under hand, or cannot write down things.

Then I tried Google Docs. I was taking notes about what I ate, what pain I felt, what medication I took, etc. I even created some sort of tagging system. But I feel a lot of overhead to keep it, and to write it. Also it is hard to do statistics and discover patterns, since it is just blocks of text.

Solution: Symptom Diary

Symptom Diary can help you with all the above problems. It allows you to add all sorts of potential factors: food, activity, mood, medication, and all outcomes that can happen because of it: pains, symptoms, bowel movements and weights.

Whenever you have pain - you can log it straight away.

Type the pain name straight away, or use the saved pain name that you used before. Also, you can choose one from our Machine Learning pain names that will be used for AI analysis.

Besides that, specify date and time of the pain, set severity (how strong pain feels), pain type, duration, your notes and tags (for search).

You can leave the duration as empty, since you might not know exactly when the pain will stop.

In case of any extra severy, or in some sense specific pain that you would like to remember and be able to find quickly - tag it with some tag like “important”, “tonotforget”, etc.

Keep tracking all pains that you have and observe patterns from the analytics tab. Any time in the future - you can find the pain item, go to the date and see what you eat, what medication you took etc.

And for sure, you might export the symptom diary data for your doctor easily in any convenient format.

Results

In the end, I discovered which products and which activities produce stomach pain. What should I do to ease it? I am always aware of what is going on with my health thanks to the health diary, I spot and react to red flag pains or symptoms. On top of this, Symptom Diary helps me to track sport activities, a healthy diet and therefore helps me build good habits.

Link to the app: https://app.symptom-diary.com