Chronic pain is something we have seen occurring more and more often, with one study estimating that 25 million people suffer from daily pain in the United States. While having a physician is always the best solution, they are not always available to consult.
As a result, we have seen tremendous effort in the creation of health apps to help people throughout their lives and chronic pain is no exception. We have curated a list of the best chronic pain management apps to help you go through your day and live better with chronic pain.
1. Pathways Pain Relief
Pathways Pain Relief is a program designed to help diagnose and offer solutions to chronic pain. It is devised to try and ease chronic pain and even get rid of persistent pain. When pain lasts for longer than three months, your body's pain system can start becoming overactive and overprotective. Pathways' focus is on retraining your brain to reduce the amount of stress and pain.
Pathways' diagnosis helps identify the origin and type of pain, specializing in areas such as back pain, migraines, joint pain, digestive issues, and many more. The program uses a variety of key techniques to help you manage and control your pain including pain science education, breathing visualizations and graded imagery, physical exercise, meditations, and stress-reducing exercises.
Pathways' role is a personal pain therapist who will take you on your own journey to understanding why you feel pain, and work to break the pain cycle. You can monitor your performance over time, tracking how your pain develops over time, and focus on the pain relief techniques that work for you. The app gives you the freedom to determine what methods work best for you.
Download: Pathways Pain Relief for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
2. Wave
Wave is a health app for chronic illness patients to track symptoms, medications, sleep, steps, and other activities. You can determine what’s impacting your ups and downs, see engaging charts on various fields such as your moods, medications, activities, and sleep, and share all these ongoing reports with your doctors to avoid side effects and improve your care.
Wave's goal is to provide you with personal insights that enable you to work more effectively with doctors to better control the side effects and symptoms you experience. Wave acts as a virtual advocate for your health and a companion helping you to do everything in your power to feel better.
You can integrate with health devices such a Google Fit to keep an active record of your physical and emotional well-being.
The app uses an AI to generate personal insights based on your own experiences. There are provided in real-time and composed to help you identify how your actions are related to your condition and symptoms, so you can take control of your health while facing chronic illness. You'll discover what's related to your ups and downs and what you can do to take control of your health.
Download: Wave for Android | iOS (Free trial, subscription required)
3. Curable
Curable is a virtual coach to help you manage and deal with your pain through mental activities. It provides you with guidance and bite-sized audio lessons to teach you, as well as over 100 science-backed exercises for relief. Curable's motto is "Your pain experience is unique, and your recovery program should be, too." It focuses on your needs and health to ensure you are never pushed too far and considers the user's health their priority.
The app is designed by a science advisory team consisting of members in various disciplines. It has been recognized by various industries and is considered the Highest Quality App for Persistent Pain in a large-scale peer-reviewed study evaluating 19 top apps for symptom self-management.
Curable describes itself as a "different approach to your pain." Rather than being medication or physical treatment, its app delves into the brain science of pain to alleviate it.
Curable takes all the information about you and designs a custom program tailored to your symptoms and preferences. The app's goal is to help you realize how much your mental health affects your pain and provide a regime to help you with managing your chronic pain.
Curable has four types of exercises: brain training, education, meditation, and writing. The app monitors your affinity and lessons you are comfortable with and recommends lessons accordingly.
Download: Curable for Android | iOS (Free trial, subscription required)
4. CareClinic
CareClinic is your daily all-in-one health and wellness app that helps you measure, learn, and improve your health. The app helps you create a care plan to track and manage your symptoms and conditions. It can be used as a pain tracker and symptoms journal. If you are interested in more generalized health trackers, then check out our guide on the best health journal apps.
The app allows you to create a treatment and pill organizer to keep track of more than just your medications such as vitamins, supplements, conditions, nutrition, activity, daily vitals, therapies, and automatically discover correlations and triggers. You can take a photo of your prescription and reports to enter information.
CareClinic provides you with a drug and supplements database for references and information. The database also provides nutritional information, allowing you to automatically get calories, micronutrient, and macronutrient information for food and drinks.
Further features include scheduling medication reminders, and a daily check-in diary to record your treatment progress alongside medication reminders. You can record various measurements including PRN, sleep, daily mood, energy levels, pain, and many more. The diary also functions as a symptom diary to log symptom severity.
The app allows you to work with your doctor or caregiver, allowing them to view your care plan and reports. You can correlate summarized reports from your check-ins with your app to see what works and what doesn't alongside your goals.
Download: CareClinic for Android | iOS (Free trial, subscription required)
Manage Your Pain for a Healthier Lifestyle
It can be hard to go through your day with chronic pain. It can affect your mood and performance at work. Some people resolve themselves to chronic pain being something they can't escape from and that is a negative attitude to carry.
A healthy mind and body are the keys to living a fulfilling life. It is important to realize you are not alone and you can get through it. All it takes is a firm resolve to face your pain head-on and conquer it.