Many people have a hard time getting to the bottom of why they are having health issues or identifying the source of symptoms. It can be months, years, and a lot of out-of-pocket costs just to be told that it isn’t clear what the problem is.
For that reason, crowdsourcing site CrowdMed is helping people by having an expansive collection of resources all sharing their insights about what they think the underlying problem might be.
Boston Magazine shared one of the success stories that involved Catherine Tan from Concord, Mass. Tan fell of her bike and hit her head when she was 15 years old, and soon after that incident, she had blinding headaches and issues with her vision. After 6 years of visiting doctors and spending $250,000 on medical bills, there still was no treatment plan put in place. This led Tan’s mother, Julie Davidson, to share her daughter’s story on CrowdMed with a $400 award for an accurate diagnosis.
“The medical establishment was by and large horrible. Because it is such a siloed system of treatment, if you have anything going on that crosses disciplines, people don’t know how to communicate with each other,” Davidson told Boston Magazine. “I think [CrowdMed] is a community of people who hold out hope for each other, and of young medical professionals who are reading and thinking in much more creative ways. It really was thanks to CrowdMed helping us hang in there, as much as anything else.”
After tan’s original bike accident, the doctors dismissed the chances that she actually suffered from a concussion, but after getting input on CrowdMed, it was determined that she had suffered from some brain damage. She is now being treated at Cleveland Clinic.
Tan’s accurate diagnosis isn’t a rarity, according to CrowdMed founder, Though it’s incredible, CrowdMed founder Jared Heyman. He told the magazine that the average case is solved by CrowdMed’s community of “medical detectives” in only 75 days. “The fact that we can do more in two or three months than the medical system in several years is pretty compelling,” he says.
The people helping solve these cases don’t need to be healthcare professionals necessarily.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“We believe that the most credentialed people are not always the best when it comes to solving cases,” Heyman said. “There’s a lot of med students out there and nurses and chiropractors and nutritionists who don’t have MDs by their name, and are actually very good at solving tough medical cases.”
Tan is now almost finished with her intensive treatment and will be able to attend college.
