THAT people scour the pages of the world wide web searching for answers to medical problems is well known. Indeed, doctors label the most diligent seekers of online medical information “cyber-chondriacs”. Some frustrated individuals have even set up their own websites, replete with data about their conditions or those of family members, to encourage strangers to help solve “mum’s medical mystery”, or offer a cure for a particular brain cancer.
But to create a lone website in the hope that a knowledgeable passer-by may shed light on a mysterious illness is the cyber-equivalent of crying in the wilderness. To create one on which anyone and everyone can post a problem, so that anybody who might, for whatever reason, want to help knows where to go, is more like setting up a stall in a market at which buyers and sellers know where to meet. And such a stall, called CrowdMed, now exists.
The need for a “crowdsourced” service like this comes from the number of rare diseases around. The National Institutes of Health, America’s medical agency, recognises 7,000—defined as those that each affect fewer than 200,000 people. A general practitioner cannot possibly recognise all of these. Moreover, it may not be clear to him, even when he knows he cannot help, what sort of specialist the patient should be referred to. Research published in 2013, in the...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1dmSjiH
No comments:
Post a Comment