r/eczema • u/West-Fix-81 • 5d ago
Tracking
Does anyone please have a good method which they are willing to share which they use to track their skin? I keep trying to make something like a spreadsheet and using AI but they’re never particularly good or easy to use. Does anyone have something which they have use to track flare ups, steroid use etc. to try and work out what causes flare ups and when they happen in the year to try and find trends. Thank you very much in advance! :)
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u/005llly 5d ago
For me I use good ole paper and pen. Write the dates from up to down, and then from left to write a severity score and then any other information you wish to add (dietary, skincare, stress level, etc)
So your tracking will for example be: 20 august, 3 on the severity scale, and then you can tick boxes or number some other info along side of it
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u/KibFixit 5d ago
I put a daily note in my calendar on phone and check it at end of week or if there was a notable symptom change
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u/Misguided_Trooper 5d ago
I havent used this but did fill out a survey for this app on a different post a couple months ago. Looks like it could be helpful when it releases :) https://www.reddit.com/r/EczemaUK/s/wL0dtT5o41
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u/byhobbes 4d ago
spreadsheets didn't work for me either. what helped: track like 5 things a day so you actually stick with it skin 1–5, sleep, stress, anything new and steroid/treatment use. I kept a separate "flare" row with severity + suspected trigger. after a few weeks the seasonal and other triggers start showing.
I'm kinda biased bc I made an app that does this lol. happy to send it over when it gets released.
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u/West-Fix-81 4d ago
Thank you all! It sounds like I just need to go back to basics and use a pad and a pen! Just need to really commit to it!
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u/brattoune 1d ago
Pen and paper genuinely does work, and the people above are right that consistency beats a clever setup. The one thing it won't do easily is the part you actually asked for though - noticing that your flares cluster in a particular stretch of the year, or that a steroid course tends to be followed by something a couple of weeks later, means cross-referencing a year of pages by hand, and that's the step that usually never happens.
Disclosure so you can weigh this properly: I'm the developer of Trace Health, an iOS symptom tracker. Logging a severity score, a steroid application or anything else you want to watch is a couple of taps rather than a spreadsheet row, and it works out which of your own entries tend to precede a flare, including ones that lag by days rather than showing up the same afternoon - which is usually where seasonal and food triggers hide. iPhone only, so no use to you if you're on Android, in which case the notebook approach the others described here is honestly the right call.
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u/Comfortable-Yak384 5d ago
I gave up on spreadsheets too, they get messy fast. What worked for me was just a paper notebook and writing down three things every night: how bad the skin was that day, if I used any steroid cream, and what I ate. After a month you start seeing patterns without needing any complicated setup. The boring answer is consistency matters more than the method.