Use an Electronic Pain Diary to Understand your Disease

ZURICH, February 28, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

An app to support medical treatment

One of the big challenges in chronic pain treatment is the discrepancy between what happens in everyday life and what can be remembered in the doctor's office. During the day, the pain level can fluctuate significantly; the pain location might change over time, and so forth. Many aspects can trigger and influence the pain. However, when a patient is asked in the doctor's office to reconstruct all these varying aspects, the challenge is immense. It is no surprise that important details get forgotten. This is why pain diaries should be used. What better way is there to keep such a pain diary on devices we have with us all the time: tablets, smartphones, computers? That is why Sanovation AG developed the pain diary app CatchMyPain.

Let's say you suffer from headache

The benefit of such a pain diary can best be explained by an example. So let's say someone suffers from migraine. Every time the pain appears, the patient draws the exact location on a body model, specifies the intensity, the quality and other aspects and notes maybe something he ate before. This is repeated for several weeks and eventually shown to a neurologist. Based on such pain entries the doctor sees how the pain occurs in everyday life. Maybe it is always on one side of the head, pounding in character, quite intense but disappears after a few hours. It is easy for the specialist to notice the connection and a potential diagnosis is quickly made: migraine. And with the noted food even potential trigger factors could be named.

From fibromyalgia to lupus - it's all covered

It does not only work for headaches - an area in the medical field where the use of pain diaries is already quite common. From fibromyalgia, over back pain, to lupus - from emotionally triggered pain over general physical appearances to concrete diagnosis - there is always potential for a pain diary to improve the situation. The patient or the medical care provider can gain new insights, observe treatment control and evaluate the necessity for more or less drastic interventions. Additionally, the visual representations in the pain drawing can be used for communicating about the pain.

We want your arthritis to get better

We want to help people to understand their diseases, to understand what helps and makes them feel better. That is why CatchMyPain is constantly being improved and adapted to fit specific diseases such as arthritis - based on inputs from users as well as from medical experts. Lately the option to track stress and fatigue was added and in the near future it will be possible to find similar patients and exchange experiences. The potential is huge and the individual gain as well as the chances for the medical world in general are immense.