127 Figuring Out What Treatments Work Best For "Your Condition" Using AI and Crowdsourcing

<p>After spending a decade endlessly searching online to help family members cope with medical conditions. Yael Elish (a core member of the Waze founding team) found that... <i>time and again, <strong>other people</strong> were the key to discovering the most effective treatments.</i></p><p>An idea was born...<strong>StuffThatWorks helps people learn which treatments work best for their condition using smart, AI-based crowdsourcing.</strong> You know your condition best. How it feels. What aggravates it. Which treatments work. (And which ones don’t.)</p><p><strong>Talking Points:</strong><br />-Symptoms are indicative of a condition.<br />-300-400 treatments per condition.<br />-Stuff That Works is empowering people to share their experiences.<br />-Patients have real-world information in the medical world.<br />-The age of onset for chronic illnesses is dropping dramatically.<br />-50%-90% of the time patients can diagnosis themselves. Compare that with John Hopkin's diagnosis rate of 27%.</p><p><strong>TOGETHER WE ARE BETTER</strong><br />Most of us dealing with a chronic condition spend hours online searching for <strong>better treatments</strong> because we feel no one has properly researched which treatments will work best for people like us. We’re right: nobody’s doing it, even for the most common or serious conditions, let alone more mundane or rare ones. It’s just too expensive to conduct large-scale patient interviews, and most medical research is done on very small groups of people. The result? The treatments we get are far from being optimized for us.</p><p><strong>ENTER CROWDSOURCING</strong><br />Just like Wikipedia, Waze or Kickstarter, when people come together for a common cause the result can be huge. We should be driving the research about our condition: we know how treatments affect us, and collectively we have more information than any organized research could ever gather. Together, we can build the world’s richest and most up-to-date database for treatment effectiveness, and use it to learn m