The more than 100 million people in America who suffer from chronic pain probably can’t imagine how a smartphone app can be of any help to them. This app doesn’t hook up to your body to deliver relief. Instead it acts as your personal pain coach to help you do the things you need to do to feel better.

Pain Coach is from WebMD, a leader in providing online health information.

This app handles chronic pain from a holistic angle, encouraging sufferers to keep up with their own symptoms and triggers in order to find solutions. Since the app is free, chronic pain patients can’t go wrong in downloading this app and trying it out.

Each tip is reviewed by doctors and delivered to each user daily, customized to his or her individual situation. The app is specifically designed to help users suffering from back pain, neck pain, nerve pain, fibromyalgia, migraine, osteoarthritis, or rheumatoid arthritis. The app tracks a user’s daily pain level, symptoms, triggers, treatments, and drugs to provide an overall view of that user’s history.

As a user enters symptoms, the app gets to work, with tips geared toward a patient’s particular symptoms.

The app is set up to provide daily tips, keep track of a user’s progress, and provide users access to an extensive library of health information.

Users are also encouraged to set regular goals, which revolve around pain-relieving activities such as performing exercises recommended by a doctor or incorporating more strength-building activities into a day.

WebMD recognized that many who suffer from chronic pain have more than one condition, which is why WebMD’s Pain Coach uniquely enables tracking of multiple chronic pain conditions all within one app,” said Dr. Michael Smith, chief medical editor at WebMD. “WebMD Pai Coach is also a portable reminder and checklist for patients to reference when communicating with their physician at the point of care, enhancing patient-physician communications to help with health decisions and treatments.”

On the physician side, the app is even more welcome than on the patient side.

Prior to launch, WebMD polled physicians and patients and found that 92 percent of physicians would prefer a patient have an easy way to track symptoms between office visits. Thanks to Pain Coach, patients can easily keep up with symptoms and report those symptoms to their medical care providers.

That same survey found patients were interested, as well. The vast majority (89 percent) of respondents agreed that they’d use a mobile app to track pain through a diary. 70 percent reported that they would use a mobile app that provided health-related information to help manage their pain.

Since some patients suffer from more than one type of pain, WebMD’s Pain Coach can keep up with multiple conditions simultaneously.

Patients can attach different goals to different conditions and check those goals off as they are completed.

Once all data has been entered and the user’s tracking is underway, the Pain Coach generates a report that shows in chart form that user’s pain levels, common symptoms, triggers, and treatments. This information can be used to alter your future behaviors, thereby hopefully reducing symptoms. WebMD Pain Coach members can also share information in the app’s extensive library with their social media networks, which is a win-win for the app and its users.

While chronic pain sufferers cannot receive physical help from an iPhone, this app is the next best thing. With an increasing number of senior citizens in this country, it’s more important than ever to find healthy ways to get control of their health symptoms.