Manage My Pain App Review

Manage My Pain is designed to help users track, understand, share and manage the pain that you are going through. The app is relevant to many different chronic conditions, including fibromyalgia, arthritis and migraines.

The idea is a powerful one.

Chronic pain conditions often don’t have a simple solution. Many conditions can also vary in severity over time, without any clear patterns.

Being able to track your pain (or the pain of a loved one) can provide a more objective sense of what is going on. More importantly, this type of app can show you patterns in data that you would have never noticed yourself.

My Full Manage My Pain App Review

• What is Manage My Pain?
• How Does It Work?
• What Does It Cost?
• Manage My Pain App Reviews
• My Thoughts About Manage My Pain

What is Manage My Pain?

Manage My Pain is, as the name suggests, an app to help you manage your pain, mostly by allowing you to track pain and related factors.

The app works by allowing you to make Pain Records and Daily Reflections.

Each of these involves a variety of questions. You can choose how many questions you answer and how many you don’t.

How Does It Work?

Manage My Pain starts off by asking basic questions, including what condition you have (if any) and what medication you’re on. In both cases, you can add your own responses in if their selections don’t cover what you need.

Pain Records

Pain Records are a key part of the app. These are where you record your pain and any related symptoms. Making a pain record is meant to be fast, but there is a bit of setup time involved.

The main aspects of the Pain Record are:

• Pain (on a scale of 0 to 10)
• Location of the pain
• Other associated symptoms
• What words best describe your pain?
• What made the pain worse?
• What medication did you take?
• What besides medication did you try for your pain?
• How long did your pain last?
• Where were you during your pain?
• Notes

For me, adding a Pain Record was a little frustrating the first time around. One of the early steps is to specify where it hurts. The app has plenty of options, but there are also some obvious gaps.

For example, I have fibromyalgia and often experience significant wrist and ankle pain, more so than in any other joints. Neither wrists nor ankles were in the app’s default list.

Still, this isn’t a large problem, as the app allows you to add in any other areas you like (which is exactly what I did).

Daily Reflection

There is also a Daily Reflection. This allows you to record meaningful activities and whether you did what matters to you today.

The section could be useful for tracking the way that daily function changes over time, especially for people who struggle with depression or anyone who finds that pain limits what they are able to do.

Results

The Results part of the app has various subsections:

• Insights
• Timeline
• Charts
• Calendar
• Records

Reports

Unlike the rest of the app, the Reports section of Manage My Pain requires you to create an account. You can do so with Facebook, Google or your email address. In each case, you need to verify your email address before everything will work properly.

The reports section is where things get interesting.

You’re able to generate reports on your pain, which can be perfect if you want a hard copy or if you want to share the information with your medical professional.

Basic reports are free to create, which is pretty cool.

But, you’ll need to pay a credit if you want your report to include more than the last 30 days of data or if you want to include any of the advanced sections (which are Chart View, Timeline View or Calendar View).

On my end, one credit costs $1.79, three cost $5.49 and five cost $7.49. The prices seem to be in New Zealand dollars (as I’m in New Zealand), although the currency wasn’t specified.

The reports do look good. I haen’t been using the app all that long, but even so, the report that I could generate was relatively useful. Some images from that report are below.

I can see how this type of report would be useful for a healthcare provider. It gives a decent idea about patterns.

I find the infomration useful for myself. I can’t really see any causes of pain spikes for myself, but I think that I might be able to if I used the app for long enough.

What Does it Cost?

As well as the ability to buy credits, Manage My Pain has three subscription plans.

Lite Version (Free)

• Add and view records: No limit
• Analytics and insights: Limited to the last 30 days
• Reports: One full report included, then limited to the last 30 days

Pro Version ($7.49 NZD one-time fee) 

• Add and view records: No limit
• Analytics and insights: No limit
• Reports: Three full reports included, then limited to the last 30 days

Pro Subscription ($7.49 NZD per month): 

• Add and view records: No limit
• Analytics and insights: No limit
• Reports: No limit

Personally, the Pro Subscription seems like too much money for not much benefit, but I might seriously consider the Pro Version. This gives you access to full analytics and insights on the app. While you don’t get many full reports, I’m less interested in that feature.

Manage My Pain App Reviews

As I’m writing, Manage My Pain averages 4.5 stars in the Google Play store, which is a pretty good rating.

The main limitation is that there are only around 850 reviews of the all. This is on the low end for a good Google Play app.

Still, the number of reviews isn’t so surprising. Manage My Pain is a specialized app. It’s designed for people with chronic pain and possibly their caregivers or family members. This is a relatively small audience.

The image below shows the distribution of reviews, which is really encouraging.

As you can see, there are relatively few negative reviews. Many of these are old too. For example, I saw 1-star reviews from 2012 and 2013. Realistically, any problems that the app had back then have probably long since been fixed.  

The main recent complaint that I found was that some people aren’t happy with the long End User License Agreement or the fact that users seem to need to accept this before they can use all of the app.

To me personally, this type of EULA seems like a given. Many apps have such agreements, especially ones that are recording health data. I would be surprised if such an agreement wasn’t in place.

Some users have made suggestions, such as making it easier to edit incomplete pain records (this would be really useful, as it would make it possible to start a record when the pain begins and finish it later).

Still, the company responds to comments well and may even add in some of the suggested changes in the future.

For that matter, the company has solid customer service in general. They respond to positive and negative comments on Google Play quickly and don’t rely on canned responses.     

My Thoughts About Manage My Pain

Honestly, I like the app.

There are other similar apps out there, but this one seems to get better reviews. I can see why too. It performed perfectly for me, was logical to use and had plenty of guidance. There was even a user guide and a FAQ.

I also noticed that there is a web version, so you can use this if you don’t have your phone on you.

I was particularly impressed with the pain record side of things. While it took a little while to set up the various categories, I have to admit that adding a Pain Record was fast and easy to do.

It was easy to just move through and tap on the answers that I wanted. The app allows you to skip sections too, which I like.

For example, I find it easiest to record pain as I’m experiencing it – so I can’t accurately say how long the pain has lasted. Recording the duration of pain doesn’t make much sense in my case either, as the severity changes over time, but it’s rare for there to be no pain present.

I also like that you can press down over an entry and choose to duplicate it. This opens up a new pain record with the same values as the one that you’re duplicating. Doing so makes the process much easier if your pain often has similar characteristics.

I’m pleased with how they approach payment too. You get a decent number of features from the free version of the app, while the paid aspects expand on this nicely.

Honestly, it’s unusual to see so free features on this type of app.

There are, of course, some frustrating things to mention.

One is that to get the most useful reports, you need to provide information like when your pain period started and ended, as well as the approaches you used to manage the pain and whether they worked. Doing this in practice is frustrating, especially if you have extended pain periods.

I found this part to be particularly annoying, as my pain is largely ongoing.

Still, this isn’t really an issue with the app itself. Manage My Pain has organized things well. At the end of the day, accurately recording chronic pain isn’t the easiest task in the world.

The other frustrating thing is that the app has a default notification that pops up at 8pm. This is easy to turn off, but I always hate it when apps set notifications on by default.