Great NPR story today on how online social networking is helping to bring medical patients together to talk about their conditions and compare treatments.
The story quotes Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet and American Life Project:
“They are posting their first-person accounts of treatments and side effects from medications,” says Fox. “They are recording and posting those podcasts. They’re tagging content. They are part of the conversation. And that, I think, is an indicator of where we could be going in terms of the future of participatory medicine.”
For every story that talks about the bad on the Internet, there are are hundreds of positive examples about how online communities improves lives. If only we can get the doctors to use online technology more often….
-Braden Cox