Guest Post by How to Cope With Pain Blogger
One of the great things about blogs is sharing helpful, cool sites and gadgets you find. Sharing with others makes all our journeys easier and no one has to “reinvent the wheel” on her own. In that light, I came across this headache diary, which looks great for tracking headaches, including details like date, time, location of pain, type of pain, etc.
Have you ever used it? Do you use something else? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
The writer of this post blogs anonymously as she is a practicing psychiatrist. Her practice focuses mostly on patients with chronic pain. Having had chronic pain herself, her practice and blog reflect a deep understanding of its challenges.
There are several reliable studies that show the effectiveness of keeping a headache diary.
Take a look at ABIS’ free headache tracker software at http://www.headacheanalyzer.com. We’re constantly improving upon it and headache tracker does provide some nifty graphics to track your headache episodes.
Here’s wishing you a headache free day!
John Burns
For some reason, the thought of keeping a migraine diary never occurred to me until I read this post. I did the MIDAS test and all my answers were estimates and guesses. Duh! I’m going to keep a spreadsheet and keep track. I will check out your link also, thanks!
Hmmm. So, it prints off a text file of repetitive comments like, “pressing, level 3, nausea” for a provider to review? That’s so helpful. Not.
Now, if it printed off the graph, that might be useful. The ability to see trends is powerful.
I have suffered from daily headaches for 16 years, and I have trouble remembering to take tylenol, much less keep a headache diary. I just never thought it was worth the time and WAY too depressing to record the same headache day after day after day. I spend my energy trying to ignore the pain and function through it. I don’t want to dwell on strength scales and when I noticed the pain (That would be always!)
This is so cool! I don’t have a portable device to use it with. But, if I did, I would totally use it. I use a paper headache diary provided by my dr. and bind it in a braded folder.