What happens when people come together to help each other get well? We've heard remarkable stories from PatientsLikeMe, CureTogether and SugarStats, where people share medical data so personal that HIPAA would flippa.

People are coming together to run, lose weight, kick smoking and more. This seems like the tip of the iceberg. Ths nascent field already has a journal, the Journal of Participatory Medicine. Some of its founders and advisors will be our guests for this call.

With Esther Dyson, Alexandra Carmichael, Jen McCabe, Susannah Fox and Adam Bosworth, let's discuss: 

• What is participatory medicine? What's new about it?
• How are medical institutions interacting with the crowdsourced sites?
• What building blocks are still missing to help this system thrive?

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Additions from a call participant:

Recently there was a TED-MED in San Diego followed by BIL-PIL (the free, disorganized unconference) in the same city.

One presentation at the latter was from a guy who has started some coops to develop medicine for one. Cancers, for example, tend to have unique cell surface markers so we would want to develop a medication for that cancer and test it to ensure that it would attack your cancer and not attack your other cells. He claimed that neither the FDA nor the Canadian health service would object to testing such an experimental medication on the one person it was designed for. This might be expensive for the first few, but pretty soon, the Do It Yourself (DIY) biology dweebs would make the process cheap and quick.

Another person there showed off a prototype of a PCR machine which could be manufactured and sold for about $100. The machine was the size of half a pound of butter and had a fat shaft which did the heating and cooling cycles while surrounded by a set of hollow plastic rings each containing a sample to be magnified and the appropriate nucleotide soup and polymerase enzyme. Such inexpensive devices facilitate more interesting DIY biology projects.

A major improvement intended in the current drive to health care reform in the USA is universal use of an electronic medical record which is to share currently siloed information kept on paper or in separate EMRs by the various specialists dealing with a patient's multiple chronic conditions which tend to develop as we age. Perhaps we can encourage those EMR systems to include data from patients concerning not only their prescriptions and the history of procedures performed, but also their supplements and diet and exercise logs and even journals of daily outcomes. If kept well, these could later be mined for hints about what works so evidence based advice can become broader and more effective.