Most often patients are asked by doctors to maintain a diary to record the extent of their pain on a daily basis. The diary, commonly known as pain diary helps therapists and physicians understand the patient’s condition and it also is a way to learn about important details of the patient’s condition which may have been missed out on, the press release on a latest study stated. The study conducted by the University of Alberta's Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry analysed the impact a pain diary has on the patients.

The pain diaries have details of the patient’s symptoms, his degree of pain and the treatments that help ease it or may have made it worse. The diary is most often thought to have positive effects on the patient, the press release states but the study conducted by the researchers has showed that the opposite may be true. For the study 50 patients with lower back or lumbar sprains were taken as subjects. The aim was to observe how the pain diary helped these patients recover from their pain.

Half of the subjects were told to keep diaries and record their pain on a scale of ten for four weeks. The other half did not maintain any diary. All the subjects were in their 30’s and had similar problems. Their progress was checked after a period of three months. It was seen that contrasting to the notion that pain diaries help, those who had not maintained a diary had recovered from the injuries. Explaining the situation, clinical professor in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry's Department of Medicine and a practicing physician in several Edmonton medical clinics, Robert Ferrari said that though the diary that was maintained by the subjects were not very extensive it had a negative outcome on them. "The self-reported recovery rates were 52 per cent in the group that kept a pain diary and 79 per cent recovery at three months in the group that did not keep a pain diary,” he said.

He also stated that doctors cannot do much in terms of treatment to cause a recovery of 25 per cent for the group. He states that the study proves that pain diaries curb recovery and amplifies the symptoms of patients. It makes them concentrate more on the problems and prevents recovery. He states that thinking about the symptoms only makes the symptoms greater and does not reduce it any way.

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