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How to Use Twitter as a PainDiary for Your Chronic Illness
by Lisa Copen
If you have a chronic illness or live with dailychronic pain you are physician may haverequested for you to keep a diary of your painlevels so that he can monitor what activities or influences in your life can increase your level of  pain. He may have recommended that you alsorecord your sleep patterns and even your dietIf you have attempted to take this on and do it thoroughly, you know that it can be anoverwhelming feeling to keep track of all of your activities and still maintain a sense of normal life. He can be extremely helpful, however, to you and your medical team, to havea written record of your activities, diet, etc. to help discover what is it is causing you thegreatest pain. Was that extreme flare caused by a minor food allergy, the weather conditions, or that you were up all night with friends?It is ironic while those of us who live with chronic pain they find it challenging to writedown what we are doing all of the time, what we are eating, and how we are medicatingourselves, millions of people are on the social network Twitter are recording what theyate 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! Now is the time for those of us who have a chronic illness to let Twitter worked for us!This social networking tool has been used to help people with dieting, exercise, and evenencouragement to stop smoking. But it may best benefit those of us with illness, whoneed to record enough of our life to figure out what is causing an increase in pain.Here are the 5 steps to do this:[1] Create an account at Twitter just for your chronic pain logs. If you already have aTwitter 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 toapprove any followers before anyone can see your Twitter account. Since this is privatemedical information, we recommend not approving anyone. If you are already Twitteringthis 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 aswell.
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