Helpful Apps for People With Chronic Pain

I never thought that managing my chronic illness would mean pulling out my phone, but I’ve found a couple of apps that are very useful for me. I would like to share them, as any tool that makes things easier is something we all need.

The first is My Pain Diary. This app allows you to log your pain score each day (you know that your doctors are going to ask) – but it does much more than that. In addition, it tracks the weather, so you can see if your pain scores change with the weather, and it allows you to track more than one condition at the same time.

You can then check off location, type, trigger, remedy for pain and even set more metrics that you may want to track.  Each of those metrics is customizable, so you may have pain in your leg and want to differentiate between pain in your foot, calf, knee or thigh. You can put those into the location category. Maybe you
get different types of pain: burning, dull, and throbbing, you can enter all of those under the “type” entry.

There is a place for you to write notes and the ability to take a photo and add that to a daily entry. The best part, to me, is that you can send the info to your computer and either email it or print it out for your doctor.  Because we all know that chronic pain can cause brain fog, and who knows if we will remember all the crucial info we want to share.  I have a hard enough time with “What was your lowest pain level in the last two weeks?  What was your highest?” if I don’t have My Pain Diary to remind me.

The second useful app is Medisafe which is a medication tracker. It lets you enter each medication you take and the frequency you take it each day. Then it will remind you to take it at the pre-set time. You can also use it to count the pills you have left in your bottle, which then helps you know when to order a refill. Medisafe will give you information about each of your medications and interactions (of course you should get your primary info from your doctor or pharmacist, but it can provide a useful reminder). You can even get a compliance report, if you want to know how well you have been doing on sticking to your medication regimen.

For me the best part of Medisafe is the reminders. Because unlike just setting an alarm on my phone it will remind me in 10 minute intervals three or four times before stopping. And it pops up as an actual reminder text on my phone saying “remember to take your 3:30 medications.” So I can’t just ignore it once and then end up forgetting to take my medications. I would have to ignore several times, as you turn off the alarm by actually going into the app to tell it you took your meds, hitting a little check mark.

I hope that these apps are helpful for some of you, I know they have made my life a bit easier.

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Thinkstock photo by Photodjo