[NetBehaviour] La Cura: Possibilities?

[Edward Picot]

Salvatore -

This is really inspiring and fascinating.

The fact that being diagnosed with a serious illness is a dehumanising 
thing, and that people begin to see you in terms of what you've got 
rather than who you are, is a familiar observation in medicine. But I 
think you've broken new ground in identifying the way that your illness 
effectively belongs to a bunch of experts rather than yourself - you're 
the one that's 'got' it, yet you don't seem to own it - and this 
appropriation is reinforced by the way it's translated into a different 
language - the technical language of medicine, which is unfamiliar and 
disorienting to 'ordinary' people - and then reinforced again, in modern 
medicine, by the way that your data is wrapped up in proprietorial 
software, so that you can't get hold of it and do your own thing with it 
unless you happen to have quite a lot of technical knowhow.

Then on top of this, the different schools or philosophies of medicine - 
'evidence-based' Western medicine, Homeopathic medicine, Chinese 
medicine, etc. - generally tend to be mutually exclusive, which means 
that normally the patient, once he or she is committed to one particular 
school, is effectively cut off from access to any of the other schools. 
So what you've done, in taking back possession of your own data, 
throwing it open to a much wider community and using that as a means of 
developing a completely personalised health plan incorporating elements 
from lots of different traditions, is a very rare and experimental thing.

Good for you!

- Edward