My social network helped diagnose a rare disease that our doctors missed.

Her network didnt produce this, a friend who had a kid with the same disease produced this. Stop mis-attributing individual connections as being performed by the collective. Those Nazi photographs that made the rounds recently? At the time they were heralded as a "wisdom of the crowds" moment, some great network shifting in to gear to crunch a hard problem. The case here &#38; there are the same; it's not about the network, the collective knowledge, it's connecting to the right individuals.[1]<p>[1] <a href="http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/world-war-ii-mystery-solved-in-a-few-hours/" rel="nofollow">http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/world-war-ii-myster...</a>

a) As far as I can tell from the article, her doctor was at most a couple hours behind her "social network".<p>b) Her social network also produced "various diagnoses" which were presumably wrong.<p>c) I wonder how often this sort of thing happens, vs. people's networks encouraging them to not vaccinate their kids, or go on a "cleanse" or what-have-you.

Awesome example of crowd-sourcing.<p>To be honest, if I was her, I'd be a little upset (not sure at who but maybe just at the situation) that it wasn't caught sooner. It's great that the kid is alive, but judging by what the author wrote about the disease, it sounds like he is worse off for the delay.<p>The ideal user experience would give me more control. I think it's fine to outsource the decision-making process to doctors if you so choose, but there should also be an easy way to get a list of every single possibility, along with associated cost of eliminating those possibilities, etc. Yes, some diseases are really rare, but maybe the consequences of leaving it uncaught for some period of time are severe enough that I'm willing to pay to test for it up-front.<p>I'm sure most people would still opt for just letting the doctor handle everything (paradox of choice, etc.) but it seems broken that this is not at least an option. I suppose you could theoretically push your physician today for this information, but my intuition is that it'd be difficult.<p>I don't know what it would take to make this a reality (my guess is a lot of changes in the economic structure of healthcare would need to be made) but I think we should strive toward this ideal.

Bored stay-at-home moms (and I know you all read HN), please don't take this article as a suggestion to make even more Facebook posts about your children. :(<p>(Seriously though, pretty amazing story...I find it pretty unbelievable that not just one but three of her FB friends knew about a rare immune disorder.)

Well, may be article is sensationalized and doesn't reflect the reality, but wasn't it obvious that they they had to go to the hospital on the second day when symptoms got worse despite the amoxicillin? "Eyes swelled shut" and you still talking to your Facebook friends?

<i>it was inconceivable to me that complete strangers would ever fret over my child's welfare</i><p>Why are complete strangers on her Facebook? I honestly don't think her social network helped diagnose this at all. With every correct diagnoses, there are bound to be numerous incorrect ones. If you're just looking for a list of possible problems, you might as well open a med school text book.<p>Better yet, someone could organize all known medical conditions into a database by searchable symptoms and severity, and compose an algorithm to list possibilities by likelihood.

Check out Sermo - it's been around since 2006 or so and has an iPhone app that lets docs take a picture and get crowd-sourced advice. www.sermo.com

Never underestimate the usefulness of bored friends.

<i>to pepper both Beth, the pediatrician, and Emily, the pediatric cardiologist, with an endless series of random questions with which I was too embarrassed to bother my own doctors</i><p>It's your child's health! Why are there any questions that you are too embarrassed to ask his doctors?

i was thinking about a site like this awhile back because it seems doctors typically only have a few data points on most matters. the site would almost be analogous to code review except you're posting symptoms and pictures instead of code, the result is that you get more sets of eyes on the problem. the only drawback is that the wrong diagnosis could be fatal whereas a bad checkin problem just breaks the build or causes the controls of an airplane to malfunction and crash flaming into the ground. probably a legal nightmare.

I sense the next Zynga hit: DiagnosisVille.

The title is not sensationalist enough. It should read: "How Facebook Cured Kawasaki's Disease"