After enduring migraine headaches for 20 years, Michael Cowden was at the end of his rope. While he'd received treatment advice from tens of physicians, he was no nearer to mitigating the debilitating effects of his headaches than he was years earlier.
Web research yielded a wealth of information, much of it culled from blogs written by fellow migraineurs. Before long, he'd turned his treatment regimen on its ear.
Hoping to collect all this data in a single place, Cowden built and launched MigraineLiving.com, which serves as both a personal online treatment diary and an online community center of sorts for migraine sufferers.
While it may want the foot traffic of TMZ.com-still in beta version, the site boasts only a few hundred regular visitors and contributors-MigraineLiving.com is one of hundreds of Internet entities that could easily alter the way everyone from patients to physicians and researchers think about healthcare.
And the privacy-be-damned sharing of personal health information and anecdotes is at the gist of it.
To Esther Dyson, who sits on the room of consumer genetics site 23andMe.com and counts herself as an investor in PatientsLikeMe.com, which facilitates data sharing by patients, the only question is why it took so yearn for physicians and researchers to start tapping this information lode.
For the about part, those with some interest in the matter believe that individuals can determine on their own just how much information they feel comfortable sharing-and that's what worries privacy pundits.
Too, "quicker and less costly" obviously isn't sufficient justification to desert the usual clinical rigor.
Nonetheless, if all parties involved get by these and the accompanying privacy issues, it would appear that communion and pooling information in online communities like Cowden's migraine site could eventually help usher in an era of smarter, more reactive disease prediction and prevention.
Automated summary from: IAPP
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