How do you describe where it hurts so a doctor can use it?

What four facts make a location useful?

Add a fifth where you can: what it is like there. Sharp, dull, burning, throbbing, tingling; the words are imperfect, but the standard pain questionnaires use them because they carry signal (Hawker et al., 2011).

Why are everyday words fine?

Because clinicians translate, and because a confidently wrong anatomical term is worse than a clear everyday one. “The bony bit on the outside of my ankle” cannot be misunderstood. The International Association for the Study of Pain’s own definitions are written to be usable by patients as well as professionals (IASP terminology). Your job is accuracy about your own experience, not vocabulary.

Why does a body map work better than a description?

Three reasons.

Consistency. Marking the same spot on the same figure is repeatable in a way words are not. Over months, “left lower back” drifts in meaning; a mark does not.

Area. A mark can be a point or a region. Pain across the whole lower back and a coin-sized spot beside the spine read very differently, and a map holds both without a sentence.

Movement. The most useful thing about location is often how it changes. On a map, three months of entries become a picture: where it started, where it went, where it keeps returning. That is hard to say and easy to see.

What should you say about pain that moves?

Say that it moves, and record where it is each time rather than trying to summarise. A location sequence (“right hip in April, both knees by June, hands in August”) is a specific and useful account. So is the opposite: “exactly the same spot for a year.” What does not help is a description that averages the two: “sort of joints generally.”

How does Longnote record location?

Every Longnote symptom tracker can carry a location on a 3-D body atlas with 73 named areas. You tap to mark a spot or paint a region with your finger, and a single toggle sets “both sides”. Each spot is coloured by the tracker it belongs to and shaded by how bad it was, so hue says which and strength says how much. On the Home screen each tracker card carries a small body, and the atlas itself shows every tracker’s last reading, dated, so the question “where exactly, and since when?” is already answered before it is asked.