More to the point for this conversation, the adoption of these approaches — now reaching into medical schools, hospitals, MD offices, pharmacies, employer health plans (following $1.5 billion in research from NIH since 1992) — are based in large part around addressing the fundamental question “what is health?” That conversation is not taking place in the so-called national dialogue on health care. It is taking place where docs and practitioners and non-traditional healers are considering the whole patient, his or her traditions and beliefs, and in essence taking the diagnostic time that has long since evaporated in most settings and then applying an appropriate treatment, whatever its origins.

The technologies that will plug us into the health web are well and good, and of course a quintillion dollars is being ponied up for the solutions to come. But we also need a concurrent integration of new thinking about health and about wellness as these personal health platforms get dropped into the global net.

There is a natural symbiosis between Health 2.0 and Integrative Medicine that I hope we can start folding together as both these forces influence how the work of health is conducted.

We’ve gone from a craft tradition, to an production line model. We used to have doctors who took care of their patients, and knew each one of them intimately. Now we have a massive system that treats both doctors and patients as generic items.

We lost too much, it’s time to reclaim our identities, both patients and doctors and nurses, etc.

I have been following your trials and tribulations and wish you a speedy return to full health. It is a true mark of your character that you are turning the experience in to something positive for the rest of us.

I am fully behind you in advocating a user centric view to health. It is that drive that prompted me to hold HealthCampMd. I am now organizing HealthCampDc and HealthCampNy. Check them out at http://barcamp.org. If anyone plans to be at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in September then join in the HealthCamp meeting we plan to hold as part of the Web2Open stream.

I am going to see if I can attend the VRM workshop but even if I can’t I am willing to push the Health Agenda with you in any way I can.

When I was in the hospital for appendicitis, I was my own systems integrator and thankfully it was a single problem to resolve.

There are two parts to this problem. The challenge to the medical profession is that it will became more transparent (bonus to us). The benefit in this moment is that, for those of us who have been in the hospital lately, we likely recognize that we’re not that far away from social acceptance of a system that moves recognized control to our hands.

Thanks Doc.

Apropos of your post, here is one from the archives on one of my blogs (written not long after last summer’s VRM meeting in Oxford) on one of the accidental benefits of the momentary chaos of one small country’s medical-services-system-in-transition: the unwillingness of physicians and dentists to hold patients’ records and the resultant placement of records in patients’ own hands (and messy desks!). The link: http://tinyurl.com/5djcgr .

S.

Following updates of your recent hospital stay on Twitter and on the blog brought back memories of when my child spent two weeks in hospital with a serious condition before he was three months old. It was truly an eye-opener for us in terms of the ambiguity, uncertainty and lack of order of the medical system.

To ensure our son got what care he needed, and no more, my wife had to be the “systems integrator” for his care. [No one in the hospital, strangely, owned this role.] The doctors came and went, and the unifying data set was the “chart.” More than once, we had to correct a new doctor whose quick scan of the chart and glance at our son led him/her to false conclusions in the absence of the moment-to-moment context that allows the chart to make sense. My wife also had to combat the intervention bias that was present in almost every physician we met there.

Apart from that, the chaos that is the hospital/physician/hospital/lab/insurer “value chain” led to a ton more side effects–less life-threatening but also longer-lasting.

If ever there were a system that needed VRM, this is it.

regards, John