Kent Bottles Private Views: Health Hackers & Citizen Scientists Shake Up Medical Research

	Click on figure to enlarge Copy of Figure 1 describing the health care model of Health 2.0
	Emerging Patient-Driven Health Care Models: An Examination of Health Social Networks, Consumer Personalized Medicine and Quantified Self-Tracking, Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2009, 6, 492-525; doi:10.3390/ijerph6020492Author – Swan M

Kent Bottles Private Views: Health Hackers & Citizen Scientists Shake Up Medical Research

From the 5 December 2011 blog item by Dr. Bottles

Whether you call it Health 2.0, Medicine 2.0, or e-Health 2.0, the Internet is changing medicine in ways that challenge the status quo. This article explores how a group of amateurs who call themselves “health hackers” and “citizen scientists” are trying to use the Internet to connect with other patients, run experiments, and conduct clinical trials on their own diseases.

Dr. Gunther Eysenbach states “Medicine 2.0 applications, services and tools are Web-based services for health care consumers, caregivers, patients, health professionals, and biomedical researchers, that use Web 2.0 technologies as well as semantic web and virtual reality tools, to enable and facilitate specifically social networking, participation, apomediation, collaboration, and openness within and between these user groups.” One review examined 46 different definitions of Health 2.0, and Eysenbach’s definition does not emphasize a key component of the concept:amateurs can use these new Internet tools to do work that in the past was only done by professionals. (1)

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The tension between the traditional approach to medical research and patient-initiated research can only be resolved by cooperation and two-way communication between the two groups. The Mayo Clinic and PXE examples clearly show that both groups can benefit by meaningful and respectful partnership. The AIDS and ALS examples demonstrate that patients with few options and new Internet tools will continue to push the traditional research community to be open to new ideas, new approaches, and new possibilities. Gilles Frydman, founder of the Association of Cancer Online Resources, has stated, “Better-informed people are more willing to participate in the advancement of science. Those patients taking Gleevec do not consider themselves guinea pigs. They are recipients of experimental medicine.” (8)

Read the entire blog item

Related articles

• The rise of citizen scientists and patient initiated research (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• The rise of citizen scientists and patient initiated research (kevinmd.com)