CureTogether is the shape of things to come for Smart Patients. How often have you wished that you could just go to a website and find out what others have done, what has worked (and what didn’t work) for your condition? Wouldn't it make it that much easier to find a solution if this information was available in a simple to use format? 

Well, this is what CureTogether have done. This small team have launched a free service that depends on health consumers contributing their data for their condition/s. You are invited to complete the survey for your condition,  your symptoms, the treatments you have tried and what you feel are the causes. This information is turned into an infographic, where all the results from the survey on that particular condition are displayed on a quadrant chart which plots treatments against popularity and effectiveness. It is so brilliant. What’s more – if you have other symptoms, or have tried other treatments or believe that there is a cause that is not represented, you are invited to add these – and so the knowledge will just keep growing but generated by people who suffer from these conditions, not the medical profession.

When 1,000 treatment ratings are gathered for a condition, the infographic is then published and the results can be quite surprising.

“But I didn’t realize how much of a puzzle CFS really was until I saw this data (in the infographic [above]). It is such a poorly understood condition that the treatments reported to help most are predominantly lifestyle changes, while the medical treatments are predominantly reported to produce negative effects. This would suggest that medicine today doesn’t know how to effectively treat CFS.” http://curetogether.com/blog/2011/02/03/surprising-new-data-what-really-helps-patients-with-chronic-fatigue-syndrome/

…Imagine patients around the world coming together to share quantitative information on over 500 medical conditions. They talk about sensitive symptoms and compare which treatments work best for them. They track their health. New research discoveries are made based on the patient-contributed data. This is happening at CureTogether, and we believe it can have a massive global impact….http://curetogether.com/blog/about/