The COVID19 pandemic is forcing everyone to learn new skills on the fly. Clinicians are teaching each other how to hotwire a ventilator to serve more than one patient. People are 3D printing spare parts for medical equipment and learning how to sew protective masks. Parents are sharing strategies for convincing their teenagers to stay home – and […]
peer-to-peer healthcare
Public Q&A: Peer support for parents of teens with cancer
Helen Burstin, MD, reached out to ask if I know of an online peer-to-peer support group for parents of teens with cancer. For anyone who knows Helen: Don’t worry, it’s not for her own family. She is asking on behalf of a friend, who writes: “I’ve been able to find groups for parents of children […]
What if your clinician gave you a prescription to check out a patient group that they knew to be good?
Amy Gleason (@PatientSide) captured this line of mine, delivered on a panel at the Health Datapalooza yesterday. Her tweet generated an interesting cascade of reactions ranging from: “This is potentially dangerous” to “This is obvious (and old news).” I thought I’d expand on my observations and see if people want to expand on theirs in […]
Crowd-diagnosing STDs on Reddit
Reddit is a massive Petri dish of human conversation, rife with peer-to-peer health encounters, so I was thrilled when Jane Sarasohn-Kahn alerted me to this article: “People Are Flocking to the Internet to Crowdsource Their STD Diagnosis—Yes, Really.” It focuses on a subreddit (aka online community) devoted to sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs). Kudos to Parade for […]
Mystery solved. Again.
Friends, I have yet another so-extraordinary-it’s-ordinary story of peer-to-peer health care to share. Andrew Wilkinson wrote on Twitter: A few months ago, as a last ditch effort, I posted on Twitter about the horrible acid reflux which I’d been suffering from for almost 10 years. I had tried just about everything. Proton pump inhibitors, dietary […]
Assessing the quality of peer health advice
“Can you really trust what you read online?” is a frequent (and valid) question about online health information, particularly peer to peer advice. People who are part of healthy peer communities sometimes scoff at the question since they see so much good coming from the opportunity to connect and share information. But how might we […]
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