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Wednesday 10 February 2010

And here we go once more

I know that it has been a while since my last posting. Since then, I have been keeping a "personal mobility and health diary" and I can only recommend that you do the same. Record every detail, however insignificant it may seem at the time, at the close of each day. The findings may astound you and may even help to predict some of the oddities associated with this condition. This is best illustrated by example!

Since September 2009, I have made a note of, among many things, the frequency and severity of my headaches. You will need to make notes of the weather on each day, the food you ate and your activities. Try hard not to miss out on things, because every little item may have importance in your analysis. Think of the most blinding headache you have ever experienced and assign it a moderate value of 7. Then assign the recorded headaches values realative to this value. Correlate, after each month, all the data you have collected. Your best bet is to create a spreadsheet of some kind.

In the first column record the date. In the next column record the weather for that day. In the next column record the severity of the headache. The next column record should be the food you consumed and the fluids you ingested. You get the idea for subsequent columns. Once you have the data, you will be able to sort on it and manipulathe data to find correlations.

My personal findings showed that weather only has an effect when the change is more that 5 degrees celsius. Shellfish is a definite No-No and so is cream. Coffee works well to rehydrate and chocolate combined with ibuprofen will work miracles. I discovered much more, but none of it is truly scientific. It has no basis in science whatsoever.

After the first month of recording, I adopted some of the things I thought could help me. I was comfortable predicting, within reason, how I would feel and making minor adjustments which made life a little easier. I was able to manage my headaches more. It goes without saying that this is only one aspect of my recordings, but the others are to juicy for this blog ;-)

1 comment:

  1. I too, highly recommend diaries, they come in handy. Have one every year since DX in 1990.

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