Small But Mighty: A Thyroid Life

SOMETHING has finally arrived to satisfy our medical needs, and it goes by the name of Medpedia.

For all those moments when you sit and wonder about the condition of your own body; for all those times when you wish to quiz the medical community on all things blood and guts; for your curiosity, your want to learn more detail about medical conditions; for your want to share and help; to be helped; to compare; for just about any medical-related query under the sun - for all of these I would recommend to you Medpedia.

In the previous post I wrote about how difficult it is to find the right information on the web; how, in a rather odd way, entering more information into a system (the internet) can actually cause us to have less; and how a thyroid newbie would probably not know which of the 13, 600, 000 links that arrive on a Google search page to click on.

To me it is just a number; a collection of digits all stringed together in a way that I cannot read; a meaningless piece of information, except to tell me that there is no point in looking at every search result
(Taken from the previous post: Paradox: We Give More; We Get Less)

Well, now there is a way for that thyroid newbie, that medical student or professional, that thyroid oldie, if you will, or that generally interested person, to find out which links to click on; in fact, to have no need to search through Google's medical links in the first place.

Medpedia is a new website and project, launched early this year, and based upon a brand new model of sharing information. If you imagine knowledge as a mass, a sea larger than the Atlantic and wider than the Earth; if you imagine knowledge as this central sea, teaming with tiny sea creatures and full to the brim with rushing waves; if you imagine this, and then erect a hundred dams to keep the water in - this is pretty much what we had before Medpedia. The doctors and other medical professionals sat on boats sailing on that sea and we, the curious and confused patients, sat on the concrete, outside the concrete dams, just waiting for a tiny drop of water to fling itself over our way.

Medpedia rids the sea of these dams and creates bridges between the sea (thus also the doctors and medical professionals) and us. With this new model, information can be shared three-way: knowledge can roam between medical professionals and organisations and be shared between non-medical professionals (patients and just about anyone else). This means that no knowledge is exclusive, but at the same time we patients can be sure that we are receiving accurate and 'official' information. The Medpedia model explains how:

In the centre of Medpedia lies their knowledge base, a wiki which is collaborative and which covers any  information about health, medicine and the body. Unlike the familiar Wikipedia, though, only medical professionals (with uncountable qualifications!) can edit articles, however ordinary people can suggest changes - which must then be approved - to these editors. This way we will know that the information we are reading is, as I've already said, accurate and official. And there are articles on just about anything from serious medical conditions to '6 things you should never say to a patient.' Every article is available to read in accessible language, but there is also a 'Clinical' tab - for the medical professionals or for ordinary people to dig deeper into their topic of interest.

But that isn't just it: Questions & Answers allows people to ask questions to the rest of the Medpedia community about anything from symptoms they are experiencing of their own medical conditions, to study questions posed by medical students and questions asked by medical professionals. Anyone can then provide an answer to someone's question, and what is really useful about this is that you will know who is providing you with this information. A person's title(s) (e.g. MD, Pharm, etc) shows up beside their name - again I must repeat the accuracy and official information point here.

Medpedia Alerts are a way of providing up-to-the-minute medical information through Twitter sources. By clicking on the link, you can subscribe to the feeds and receive the updates regularly.

News & Analysis is where the collaborative aim and centrality of Medpedia gets even bigger: here, a collection of blogs considered useful and informative enough for the website's community are listed and featured through RSS feeds so that they can be viewed without leaving the Medpedia site. My blog is featured on the site here.

The above features culminate in Communities of Interest, a collection place for information and discussion about medical conditions or various medical information categories. I have recently become a Community Administrator of the newly launched Thyroid Diseases Community, which will provide you with information and a place to discuss your symptoms and questions whether you have Hypo, Hyper, Hashimoto's, Graves, Thyroid cancer, or just about anything else thyroid-related. You can ask, answer and view questions from directly within this page; you can discuss; you can contact other people with the same conditions or interests; and there are endless useful links to websites, blogs and all.

The site also features a professional network and a directory for those people who are medical students or in a medical organisation, and this can prove a huge use to such people.

There are many sites and initiatives which claim or have claimed to of opened up the flow of information between people - we know, for one thing, that the internet has created a public freedom of knowledge and has allowed previously inaccessible information to enter the public sphere. However, I would like to point again to the abundance of web links and blogs and such-like: this knowledge-base, too, has become a sea.

Search engines pivot clockwise and anti-clockwise, day and night, and their creators claim to solve the problem of lost browsers at sea, but even with their efforts, we still don't know what links are best to click on. Is that information official - does it actually have some truth in it? Is that information outdated? What's that based on? And we have to click on a hundred links to find the answer to one question: tell me about the condition I have. It is of course always great to have such a wonderful diversity of opinions and voices and to really get a grasp on the amount of people in the same situation as you, but, especially in the case of someone not quite so computer-adapt as perhaps myself or someone else of my own age group, the right information; the most useful information, is rarely going to find its way to them without a little help. And this little help, under the category of medicine - something where you do not expect there to be a dozen answers to the same question - comes with something that can collect and collate the most useful of all the information out there, and put it all in one place: Medpedia.

To summarise, these are the features available on the website Medpedia:

• Truthful articles teaming with useful information, updated regularly; more articles added daily; of a language which is accessible to the general public, and with a 'Clinical' version for those looking for higher-level explanations.  
• News & Analysis - Learn from the general public 
• Communities of Interest - A culmination of information and a place to discuss, including the Thyroid Disease Community  
• Q&A - Ask and answer medical questions
• Alerts - Receive up-to-the-minute medical news 
• Speak to medical professionals. Know exactly who you are speaking to.
• Read documents published by medical professionals
  

Medpedia is a one-stop site. From it, you can access everything you need medical-wise: from encyclopaedic knowledge, information and advice from the general public and useful links, to questions and answers, useful contacts, and even a built-in collection-point in the way of communities of interest for all of this. You will notice that on the left-hand-side of this blog there is a Medpedia logo which says 'MEMBER' and below the image says 'MEDPEDIA News & Analysis.' Clicking on this links directly to the News & Analysis section.

Take a look.  

Medpedia is a link for your bookmarks.