I’m halfway through my copy of The Decision Tree. I’m quite honored to be a part of it, as one of those people who took my health choices into my own hands. I’m a firm believer of being our own advocates, gathering our own information and making our own choices instead of just relying on what other people tell us to do. I’m currently in the process of recovering from my prophylactic bilateral mastectomy, and while the recovery process is hard, I’m very happy to have had the ability to form my own decision tree of sorts, wade my way through the hard decisions, and come out the other end of it, empowered and feeling confident in the way I’ve chosen to handle the knowledge of my BRCA1 mutation.

Thank you so much for writing this book, and helping others to see that they too, can take charge of their health and their lives. You’ve done a great service.

Teri

http://www.amazon.com/Decision-Tree-Personalized-Medicine-ebook/dp/B0039825KI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1266964674&sr=1-2

Thanks for raising this issue! Interestingly, the doctors we’ve heard from have been universally positive about CureTogether – they love the fact that patients are actively tracking themselves and sharing with each other, but they don’t have time to actually look at the data themselves. Just knowing that their patients are active participants in their health seems to make the doctors very happy.

On the other hand, we’ve found medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies feeling comparatively threatened by what we’re doing. Doctors see us as a complement, but researchers see us as an unorthodox challenge to the way they work. We can recruit faster than they can, reach more patients, study more things simultaneously, and work with extremely little funding.

After all, gathering over 7000 patients, across over 450 conditions (most recently added was premature ejaculation), with 400,000 data points, in just over a year, at a cost of just running a server for $199/month (plus our time), proves that a new, hyper-efficient paradigm for doing research is not only possible but already happening.

Thanks for talking about this – it’s going to be an exciting year!
Alex

No single doctor should know more than a well educated patient. The right doc will know more about the right answer than the patient will but the patient should know why it’s the right answer and why all the other answers are wrong. Doctors are people and it is up to the patient community to hold them accountable – they don’t get a pass just because they’ve had some extra schooling.

Personal Health Records (PHR’s) are certainly a key to the future of a national and global health system. Our health is too precious not to take ownership.