In Pain? Get Your Smart Phone
Are you in pain ? What if your doctor could make it better, over the phone? It's a new way of easing chronic pain and it's done over your smart phone. According to sciencedaily.com, mobile phones can track patients from a distance and monitor pain, mood, physical activity, drug side effects, and treatment compliance. The Web site quotes Robert Jamison, PhD, professor of anesthesia and psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and pain psychologist with Brigham and Women's Hospital, who says that smartphone apps are helping the shrinking ranks of pain specialists treat and monitor rapidly increasing populations of chronic pain sufferers. "Today the ratio is one pain specialist for every 10,000 patients, but mobile technology allows for easy time-effective coverage of patients at a low cost, offering significant opportunities to improve access to health care, contain costs, and improve clinical outcomes," Jamison explains. OK, so it's not a magic pill. ...