Health 2.0 - How Twitter Can Help You Identify Causes of Pain

If you live with chronic pain or a chronic illness you may have been requested by your physician to keep a diary of when you are feeling your best and worst. It may also be recommended that you write down your activities, 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.

It is somewhat ironic that while we may find it a burdensome task to record what we are eating, who we are with, how much we slept, and how we are feeling, millions of people are doing this daily on Twitter. They write what they ate for lunch, if they have a migraine, and if they are up at 2 a.m. working. . . and they call it 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] Set up a Twitter account just for your chronic pain diary. If you already have a Twitter account, set up a new one that will remain private. When you open it you have the option under "settings" to make it private, meaning you have to approve any followers. Since this is your pain diary, you likely won't wish to approve any followers. It can seem strange to not want any followers if you are already a Twitterer typically seek to increase your followers.

[2] You can now write your posts at any time. You are restricted to 140 characters, but this keeps it to be a less cumbersome task. You can always submit more than one post to describe a particular situation. Set up your account so that you are able to send text messages from your cell phone so you can make posts from anywhere, not just at the computer.

[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 a doctor's visit, simply log on to Twitter and print out the posts if your doctor wants a copy. Highlight any major changes or influences in your patterns.

[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.

Lisa Copen is the founder of http://www.invisibleillnessweek.com National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week, held annually in Sept and featuring a 5-day virtual conference w/ 20 seminars online. Follow our Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/invisibleillwk for cool prizes and info. Blog about invisible illness on your site, be a featured guest blogger, meet others, read articles and lots more. Make a impact today!