7 ms·

On another note, the concept of a 'crowdsourced diagnosis' product is an interesting one. You'd post anonymously your malady, and have only verified MDs or med

On another note, the concept of a 'crowdsourced diagnosis' product is an interesting one. You'd post anonymously your malady, and have only verified MDs or med students / professionals register and offer up things to test for. They vote up / down (a la HN) and the most common suggestions rise to the top. Patient gets relevant tests, posts the test results for each suggestion. As they go down the list and cancel out each one, eventually you'd get the correct diagnosis, right? It would help to keep comments & speculation to a minimum, do things very scientific. After a while any doctor could come in and use the scenario as a reference or framework. Kind of like an open source diagnosis. Does this exist? Someone seriously needs to make this if not

hoelle 16y ago
only verified MDs or med students / professionals I wouldn't underestimate the expertise of regular people living with a disease. Parents of sick kids, especially.
- klochner 16y ago
  This is a good site for "regular people" suggestions: http://www.experienceproject.com/groups.php?c=health-wellness http://www.experienceproject.com/groups.php?c=health-wellnes...
  - pmikal 16y ago
    Mostly for people who already know what they have, not really diagnostic or symptom based. There is some interesting talks from one of the founders on Stanford's EC Corner: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?author=270 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?author=2...
- Confusion 16y ago
  They only have expertise on a specific (set of) disease(s) and are prone to identifying symptoms as problems that can be solved by the hammers they know so well. Professionals have received training in doing diagnoses and will consider a wider variety of options.
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    Abstracting across a variety of people and thus a variety of hammers is the entire point of crowd sourcing. That's why you don't call it single-person sourcing.
- rwhitman 16y ago
  I made a comment on this a few threads above. Yahoo Answers is a prime example of laypeople making suggestions. Sure there are people with experience and solutions, but for the most part you get so much background noise with people who just speculate on unrealistic solutions or tell you to take XY obscure herb. The point here is that people frame medical problems on top of their own experience. And everyone's experience is different. You can have the same symptoms for countless different diseases. My thinking is that the only people who can see this objectively are medical professionals who have different folks coming into their office every day. Everyone else is biased by their own experience. Does this make sense?
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    I've dealt with a lot of medical professionals. They're biased by their own experience as well, plus they're biased by the latest medical fads (don't think they don't exist), and they're biased by the ads they see in JAMA. They're not selected for being clear thinkers - they're selected for being good at rote memorization and kissing authority ass, Gregory House notwithstanding. Some doctors are fantastic. A lot are not - and a non-fantastic doctor plus a well-educated patient is a sure recipe for disaster, take it from me. Add an uncommon disease into the mix (and as our nephrologist says, there are categories of disease, like kidney disease, where every case is a new book) and the inescapable conclusion is that if you've got a chronic illness you are on your own. If you're lucky you'll find doctors that can give you good advice. But it's not likely to be the first guy down the road, either. Your larger point, that Yahoo Answers is filled with garbage, is very accurate. Most forums on any topic are filled with garbage, but health garbage has centuries of history and its promulgators are untiring. You learn to filter that crap out. What would be better - way better - is some combination of crowd sourcing and solid lay-medical journalism, investigating some of the extraordinary claims in search of extraordinary evidence (or usually lack thereof).
    - rwhitman 16y ago
      I think you're right, the combination of layman knowledge and professionals might make the most sense. The big issue here is how to weed out bad advice
pmikal 16y ago
I love this idea. Send me a message.
Vivtek 16y ago
The malpractice liability would make this very difficult for doctors, I'd think. And yeah, don't discount the layman. Some of us really aren't kooks, and some doctors are. The point of crowd sourcing here would be to replace an artificial quality metric (possession of an MD) with an organic one. What the medical establishment would think of this is a puzzler. Well -- no. They'd hate it with the heat of a thousand suns. But more to the point: what are the legal challenges to running this kind of service? I dunno. I'm not sure I want to find it out. But if somebody does, I'll be happy to write it.
- wisty 16y ago
  The medical establishment might hate the idea, but I think most doctors would like it in action. The series "House" is not a good depiction of what doctors do. "Scrubs" is a lot more accurate - busy professionals diagnosing and treating mostly unsophisticated patients.
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    Yeah, all the doctors and med school students I've known, I think, would think it was pretty cool - I'm really wondering about how hard and how fast you'd get sued, though. This kind of service would really fill some serious needs out there. Seriously, if anybody wants to handle the business end of this one, I am so on board with contributing both code and semi-informed lay medical opinions.
    - barmstrong 16y ago
      Agreed this is a great idea. Could work really well with a reputation system like StackOverflow's to weed out kooks (both doctors and lay people).
- radu_floricica 16y ago
  Or the lack of malpractice liability might make this a success. I'm guessing many times doctors tend to go with the "safe", or common diagnosis, which wouldn't be the case here. But a certain set of dressing is probably necessary for this to work. Maybe advertise it as a training tool for students?
andrew1 16y ago
Isn't this sort of what doctors do for a living, except they actually get paid to do it, rather than doing it for free on the internet.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Have you ever had a chronic illness?
stef25 16y ago
I've worked in the medical / pharmaceutical industry for 5 years, had a lot of close contact with all kinds of medical professionals and surgeons and let me tell you - they will hate this idea and most likely not spend any time taking in any of the (potentially useful) data on there. More and more you come across notes in a patient file that say mention the patient read something on the net and is convinced this is his problem, countering what their doctor is telling them and as a result being a very difficult patient. I'd imagine most doctors absolutely hate pseudo medical websites because of this. There have been some stories in the past of parents taking the medical care of their "undiagnosable" child in to their own hands and coming out successfully but the stories are few and far between. Just recently I was reading on a forum about a small medical issue of my own and the amount of crap advise was unbelievable. People will feel that their doctor is "wrong" if he doesn't give them enough attention, regardless of whether or not he is. Getting dozens of replies to your described problem may be encouraging but my opinion is that a medically trained professional is far more likely to be "right" compared to "the crowd". You can get round liability issues by making users comply with the terms and conditions but I'm not sure that as a developer I could live with the potential guilt of misguiding hopeless patients with an app I wrote. Having said that the OP's situation must be very frustrating and crowd sourcing could be a good strategy, in this case. One success story was a post on reddit where someone with bad acne was almost completely cured after a redditor suggested ditching all the meds and simply sleeping on a different, clean pillow cover every night. So "simple" solutions to complex medical problems do exist. I'd certainly give Vivtek's original post a try, you have nothing to lose. Good luck to you OP!!
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Without loss of any generality, I can tell you that in the case of our daughter, the information we eventually tracked down and applied was far, far, far more useful than the trained professionals we were working with at the time. Her gastroenterologist had come highly recommended, was dedicated, gave us all the time we needed, and was dumber than a bag of hammers, poor man. Yeah, he sure did think we were difficult patients, I'll give you that - but that note in the file represents the doctor's insecurity, and not necessarily that the patient is an idiot. (And I really must hasten to agree that there are a lot of idiots. It's a case-by-case thing.) People research their own medical issues when they're not getting satisfactory treatment. Simple as that. If you had a family doctor you trusted, who you felt was giving you the straight-up truth about what was wrong, what he was doing, why things were happening, you wouldn't need to go reading poorly spelled forum entries by mental midgets using crystals. In our son's case, we went through seven nephrologists before finding one that was satisfactory. (Well, actually two of the others were OK, but logistically more difficult.) Our dealings with Riley Children's Hospital's head nephrologist were disastrous, truly disastrous, another bag-of-hammers case, and she's respected in the field. But the problem with parents taking medical care of their undiagnosable or untreatable children in hand is that most people don't know how to separate bullshit from valuable information (of course, this applies even if you're dealing with the professionals), and the deck is stacked against you in major ways. We're kind of an exception. I've been told I should write a book about our experience, but jeez, who's got time for that? Balance this against some very good experiences we've had in the past with physicians treating my wife, but seriously - medical training is overrated, to an alarming degree. As is most training, of course, but medical training is so fetishized that it stands apart.
johnyzee 16y ago
This would probably be an extremely helpful resource. From the personal anecdotes file: I had one foot go completely limp - it had feeling and normal bloodflow but I couldn't tip the foot up, causing considerable trouble when walking. It felt like the muscle was dead. I went to three different doctors, including a celebrity in the field and none could figure out what was wrong. In the end my friend's friend, a doctor, figured it out based only on second party descriptions. He correctly made a couple of assumptions about my physique and working environment and made a recommendation which solved the problem within a few days (there was pressure on a nerve running under the knee due to a bad sitting position and very low body fat insulation). I recall Steve Yegge relating how a simple internet search enabled him to correctly diagnose a family member's fatal condition which doctor's had failed to do. I have had similar experiences. Going to the doctor so often feels like a crap shoot. Even if you get sent to a specialist in the right field (which totally depends on your GP's interpretation of the problem) you only get the benefit of one person's experience, how good (or not) that professional may be.
rwhitman 16y ago
Just checking back on comment, blown away by all the activity. If someone makes this a reality please post the progress on HN I'd be so proud to see this idea executed

hoelle 16y ago

only verified MDs or med students / professionals I wouldn't underestimate the expertise of regular people living with a disease. Parents of sick kids, especially.

klochner 16y ago
This is a good site for "regular people" suggestions: http://www.experienceproject.com/groups.php?c=health-wellness http://www.experienceproject.com/groups.php?c=health-wellnes...
- pmikal 16y ago
  Mostly for people who already know what they have, not really diagnostic or symptom based. There is some interesting talks from one of the founders on Stanford's EC Corner: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?author=270 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?author=2...
Confusion 16y ago
They only have expertise on a specific (set of) disease(s) and are prone to identifying symptoms as problems that can be solved by the hammers they know so well. Professionals have received training in doing diagnoses and will consider a wider variety of options.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Abstracting across a variety of people and thus a variety of hammers is the entire point of crowd sourcing. That's why you don't call it single-person sourcing.
rwhitman 16y ago
I made a comment on this a few threads above. Yahoo Answers is a prime example of laypeople making suggestions. Sure there are people with experience and solutions, but for the most part you get so much background noise with people who just speculate on unrealistic solutions or tell you to take XY obscure herb. The point here is that people frame medical problems on top of their own experience. And everyone's experience is different. You can have the same symptoms for countless different diseases. My thinking is that the only people who can see this objectively are medical professionals who have different folks coming into their office every day. Everyone else is biased by their own experience. Does this make sense?
- Vivtek 16y ago
  I've dealt with a lot of medical professionals. They're biased by their own experience as well, plus they're biased by the latest medical fads (don't think they don't exist), and they're biased by the ads they see in JAMA. They're not selected for being clear thinkers - they're selected for being good at rote memorization and kissing authority ass, Gregory House notwithstanding. Some doctors are fantastic. A lot are not - and a non-fantastic doctor plus a well-educated patient is a sure recipe for disaster, take it from me. Add an uncommon disease into the mix (and as our nephrologist says, there are categories of disease, like kidney disease, where every case is a new book) and the inescapable conclusion is that if you've got a chronic illness you are on your own. If you're lucky you'll find doctors that can give you good advice. But it's not likely to be the first guy down the road, either. Your larger point, that Yahoo Answers is filled with garbage, is very accurate. Most forums on any topic are filled with garbage, but health garbage has centuries of history and its promulgators are untiring. You learn to filter that crap out. What would be better - way better - is some combination of crowd sourcing and solid lay-medical journalism, investigating some of the extraordinary claims in search of extraordinary evidence (or usually lack thereof).
  - rwhitman 16y ago
    I think you're right, the combination of layman knowledge and professionals might make the most sense. The big issue here is how to weed out bad advice

pmikal 16y ago

I love this idea. Send me a message.

Vivtek 16y ago

The malpractice liability would make this very difficult for doctors, I'd think. And yeah, don't discount the layman. Some of us really aren't kooks, and some doctors are. The point of crowd sourcing here would be to replace an artificial quality metric (possession of an MD) with an organic one. What the medical establishment would think of this is a puzzler. Well -- no. They'd hate it with the heat of a thousand suns. But more to the point: what are the legal challenges to running this kind of service? I dunno. I'm not sure I want to find it out. But if somebody does, I'll be happy to write it.

wisty 16y ago
The medical establishment might hate the idea, but I think most doctors would like it in action. The series "House" is not a good depiction of what doctors do. "Scrubs" is a lot more accurate - busy professionals diagnosing and treating mostly unsophisticated patients.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Yeah, all the doctors and med school students I've known, I think, would think it was pretty cool - I'm really wondering about how hard and how fast you'd get sued, though. This kind of service would really fill some serious needs out there. Seriously, if anybody wants to handle the business end of this one, I am so on board with contributing both code and semi-informed lay medical opinions.
  - barmstrong 16y ago
    Agreed this is a great idea. Could work really well with a reputation system like StackOverflow's to weed out kooks (both doctors and lay people).
radu_floricica 16y ago
Or the lack of malpractice liability might make this a success. I'm guessing many times doctors tend to go with the "safe", or common diagnosis, which wouldn't be the case here. But a certain set of dressing is probably necessary for this to work. Maybe advertise it as a training tool for students?

andrew1 16y ago

Isn't this sort of what doctors do for a living, except they actually get paid to do it, rather than doing it for free on the internet.

Vivtek 16y ago
Have you ever had a chronic illness?

stef25 16y ago

I've worked in the medical / pharmaceutical industry for 5 years, had a lot of close contact with all kinds of medical professionals and surgeons and let me tell you - they will hate this idea and most likely not spend any time taking in any of the (potentially useful) data on there. More and more you come across notes in a patient file that say mention the patient read something on the net and is convinced this is his problem, countering what their doctor is telling them and as a result being a very difficult patient. I'd imagine most doctors absolutely hate pseudo medical websites because of this. There have been some stories in the past of parents taking the medical care of their "undiagnosable" child in to their own hands and coming out successfully but the stories are few and far between. Just recently I was reading on a forum about a small medical issue of my own and the amount of crap advise was unbelievable. People will feel that their doctor is "wrong" if he doesn't give them enough attention, regardless of whether or not he is. Getting dozens of replies to your described problem may be encouraging but my opinion is that a medically trained professional is far more likely to be "right" compared to "the crowd". You can get round liability issues by making users comply with the terms and conditions but I'm not sure that as a developer I could live with the potential guilt of misguiding hopeless patients with an app I wrote. Having said that the OP's situation must be very frustrating and crowd sourcing could be a good strategy, in this case. One success story was a post on reddit where someone with bad acne was almost completely cured after a redditor suggested ditching all the meds and simply sleeping on a different, clean pillow cover every night. So "simple" solutions to complex medical problems do exist. I'd certainly give Vivtek's original post a try, you have nothing to lose. Good luck to you OP!!

Vivtek 16y ago
Without loss of any generality, I can tell you that in the case of our daughter, the information we eventually tracked down and applied was far, far, far more useful than the trained professionals we were working with at the time. Her gastroenterologist had come highly recommended, was dedicated, gave us all the time we needed, and was dumber than a bag of hammers, poor man. Yeah, he sure did think we were difficult patients, I'll give you that - but that note in the file represents the doctor's insecurity, and not necessarily that the patient is an idiot. (And I really must hasten to agree that there are a lot of idiots. It's a case-by-case thing.) People research their own medical issues when they're not getting satisfactory treatment. Simple as that. If you had a family doctor you trusted, who you felt was giving you the straight-up truth about what was wrong, what he was doing, why things were happening, you wouldn't need to go reading poorly spelled forum entries by mental midgets using crystals. In our son's case, we went through seven nephrologists before finding one that was satisfactory. (Well, actually two of the others were OK, but logistically more difficult.) Our dealings with Riley Children's Hospital's head nephrologist were disastrous, truly disastrous, another bag-of-hammers case, and she's respected in the field. But the problem with parents taking medical care of their undiagnosable or untreatable children in hand is that most people don't know how to separate bullshit from valuable information (of course, this applies even if you're dealing with the professionals), and the deck is stacked against you in major ways. We're kind of an exception. I've been told I should write a book about our experience, but jeez, who's got time for that? Balance this against some very good experiences we've had in the past with physicians treating my wife, but seriously - medical training is overrated, to an alarming degree. As is most training, of course, but medical training is so fetishized that it stands apart.

johnyzee 16y ago

This would probably be an extremely helpful resource. From the personal anecdotes file: I had one foot go completely limp - it had feeling and normal bloodflow but I couldn't tip the foot up, causing considerable trouble when walking. It felt like the muscle was dead. I went to three different doctors, including a celebrity in the field and none could figure out what was wrong. In the end my friend's friend, a doctor, figured it out based only on second party descriptions. He correctly made a couple of assumptions about my physique and working environment and made a recommendation which solved the problem within a few days (there was pressure on a nerve running under the knee due to a bad sitting position and very low body fat insulation). I recall Steve Yegge relating how a simple internet search enabled him to correctly diagnose a family member's fatal condition which doctor's had failed to do. I have had similar experiences. Going to the doctor so often feels like a crap shoot. Even if you get sent to a specialist in the right field (which totally depends on your GP's interpretation of the problem) you only get the benefit of one person's experience, how good (or not) that professional may be.

rwhitman 16y ago

Just checking back on comment, blown away by all the activity. If someone makes this a reality please post the progress on HN I'd be so proud to see this idea executed