Jan
7
Patient Diaries–improve your treatment and outcomes
Filed Under Patient Adherence, Patient Satisfaction
Wayne Parsons, an injury attorney at the InjuryBoard.com, has a nice post about the value of keeping a diary. He recommends it to all his clients. He references an article on About.com written by independent journalist Betsy Lee-Frye.
There are actually two kinds of diaries that benefit patients. The first is a diary of the kind Mr. Parsons recommends. You record your condition, symptoms, side effects, medication plan, and etc. It provides good data for you to use when you’re talking to your doctor. For a good article on how diaries like this help you get better treatment, see for example, Use of a structured migraine diary improves patient and physician communication about migraine disability and treatment outcomes published at InterScience or A patient diary as a tool to improve medicine compliance published by SpringerLink.
The other kind of diary is a journal. Instead of recording symptoms and medications, you write about your response to any significant event in your life. Surprisingly, journals have been found to be very therapeutic. The best article I’ve seen summarizing the positive effects of journaling is Baikie & Wilhelm, “Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing”, Advances in Psychiatric Treatment vol. 11 (2005): 338-339.
Tim’s Takeaway: Patients would do well to take Wayne’s advice. Even if you don’t know how to write a diary, get started. An easy way is to google patient diary or pain diary. You’ll find lots of forms online.