As part of the digital health phenomenon, a plethora of interactive digital platforms have been established in recent years to elicit lay people’s experiences of illness, medical treatments and healthcare. These include such sites as PatientsLikeMe, Smart Patients, Health Unlocked, CarePages and Cure Together, as well as many condition-specific sites.
The function of these platforms, as expressed on the main pages of their websites, is to provide the tools and forums whereby patients and caregivers, and in cases medical practitioners, can share their experiences with others, benefit from the support and knowledge of other contributors, comment on healthcare providers and contribute to large aggregated data archives as part of developing better medical treatments and services and conducting medical research. However what may not always be readily apparent to the users of these platforms are the growing commercial uses by some of the platforms’ owners of the…
View original post 690 more words
Angela Woods
ankemaatz
anniRaw
ben kasstan
Centre for Medical Humanities
Felicity Callard
howellmevans
Jac Saorsa
Mary Robson
Renae Coles
niallhodson
Poppy van Oorde-Grainger
Jane Macnaughton
sarahatkinson2013
Simon McCarthy-Jones
William Viney
Centre for Medical Humanities Blog 