Record-keeping of Chronic Illness Is Easy with Twitter
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If chronic illness or pain is a part of your life, the odds are that at one point you have been requested by a physician to keep a log about your activities and pain levels, especially what led up to your pain being most intense. He may have suggested that you write down specific activities, your diet and exercise behaviors, and even your patterns of sleep.
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 ironic while those of us who live with chronic pain they find it challenging to write down what we are doing all of the time, what we are eating, and how we are medicating ourselves, millions of people are on the social network Twitter are recording what they ate for breakfast, the fact that they have a cold, or when they're up working at 2:30 a.m. and on the computer. . . and they consider it fun!
It's time for those of us with a chronic illness to get Twitter to work for us! This social networking tool has been used for dieting records, exercise logs, and even encouragement to stop smoking. Why not for chronic pain record-keeping?
Here are 5 steps to put this into place:
[1] Create an account at Twitter just for your chronic pain logs. If you already have a Twitter account, make a new one, and let it remain private. If you look under "settings" you will see the option to make your account private, meaning that you will have to approve any followers before anyone can see your Twitter account. Since this is private medical information, we recommend not approving anyone. If you are already Twittering this can seem a bit strange because you typically want to increase the number of followers.
[2] Now you can update your account anytime through posts that are 140 characters or less. Submit more than one post if necessary to describe a particular circumstance or outcome. Be sure to set up your account so you can text messages from you cell phone as well.
[3] If you don't know where to start, begin by posting about any major events or behaviors that are not part of your typical day, and how your body responded to them. For example, if you awake feeling horrible, ask yourself has the weather change significantly? Twitter the weather. Are you taking the same amount of medication as you typically do? Were you active or solitary yesterday? Post whatever information may be valuable to you and your medical team at any right in your treatment.
[4] Before your doctor's appointment log on to Twitter and print out the pages if your doctor would like a copy of them. Highlight any major activities that could have created ups and downs in your pain level.
[5] if you already use Twitter for personal or business use, consider using a service that can post a message to more than one Twitter account simultaneously. This way your regular tweets that include where you are or what you are doing are automatically posted to your pain diary that resides on Twitter as well.
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.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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