39 replies to this topic

[nowayout]

This thread reminds me of the old saying: The doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient.

Edited by andre, 22 May 2009 - 06:34 PM.

[Mind]

This thread reminds me of the old saying: The doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient.

Informing yourself with the latest available data is a good thing. Treating yourself is more risky. However, the knowledge that used to be exclusively the province of doctors is becoming more widely distributed. Crowd-sourced knowledge is helpful.

[Mind]

Healthy People Library Project

The purpose of this website is to provide libraries with resources for informing the public about health research, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to make healthier choices from advances that emerge from the research.

[trance]

Simple handheld device developed to diagnose your own diseases ...

An invention by Stanford students may change who diagnoses diseases ranging from the flu to HIV. The invention, called the NanoLab, is a miniature, portable bioassay that can identify several disease proteins simultaneously without doctors, technicians, or special lab equipment.


http://news.stanford...ool-072309.html

http://news.stanford...videos/577.html

http://www.ieee125.o...-labratory.html

[niner]

That's incredibly cool. Done by grad students, too. Did anyone notice the line in the linked article about them having planets named after them? Good, fast, accurate diagnostics is a crying medical need. We can't even distinguish clinically between a bacterial infection and a viral infection with high reliability today. As a result we tend to use shotgun medicine that is dangerous and wasteful, or fail to treat something that we might have, leading to a bad outcome. Next they need to increase the number of signature proteins they can detect by a couple orders of magnitude. A nice piece of work.

[SloMoSandy]

That's very very amazing, and it's just a TINY start, I imagine there'll be pretty solid hand held diagnostic devices in 5 years, which'll be sold as simple thermometers. And these guys can considem themselves as millionaires already.

Edited by VidX, 20 August 2009 - 08:57 AM.

[Mind]

Has anyone heard of, or used Healthbase yet? It is billed as a semantic search engine for health/medical databases and papers.

[Mind]

Healthguru

A website with informative videos about various health conditions. I don't have time to watch the videos...not ill right now either, however, I did hear that this site has attracted another round of VC funding, so it must have some legitimacy.

[Mind]

MyBridge4Life is now officially launched.


Imminst discussion about MyBridge4Life.

[e Volution]

Video from TEDMed about OP
Jamie Heywood: The big idea my brother inspired
When Jamie Heywood's brother was diagnosed with ALS, he devoted his life to fighting the disease as well. The Heywood brothers built an ingenious website where people share and track data on their illnesses -- and they discovered that the collective data had enormous power to comfort, explain and predict.

Quite amazing seeing it in action!