I found this site recently - it surveys people about their experience with medical conditions and treatments, and there are up-to-date results from the surveys.
In addition, the researchers regularly analyse the current data to mine information and discuss it on their blog here
They’ve found some interesting things: for instance, they found a fairly strong correlation between one particular migraine symptom (dizziness/vertigo) and whether a particular drug would help the migraine or actually make things worse. Read more about migraines and Imitrex.
Their interactive infographics are interesting as well, but it looks like you have to be registered to get them.
It is a cool idea, but it seems like all people are doing is recommending the general treatments for those conditions. I looked up conditions like anxiety or constipation, and the treatments are no different than what I’d find at any other site.
What would be interesting is when data mining can trace weird side effects and symptoms together. As an example, I recently started getting dizziness, fatigue and vertigo from a vitamin supplement. It wasn’t listed as a symptom, but googling around I found someone else with the same symptoms and decided to quit the supplement. The symptoms went away eventually. But medicine is full of vague symptoms and weird complaints that nobody can figure out or piece together. Diagnostics really needs to advance. If sites like that help, great. But to me it seems like they are just recommending current treatments.
Interesting site. I’m doing questionnaires for a number of conditions and it’s curious to see some of the questions it asks. Some are duplicative, some others are far too limited. For example, for knee pain it asks what prescription drugs you’ve used and then only lists about 5 - omitting all but one of the prescription NSAIDs. I wonder how you can get them to add more items to the lists?
I don’t really think this particular site is about finding possible diagnoses as it is about comparing treatments. However, you can look up a symptom and find what other people thought caused their problem, and add your own.
I’m not sure what you are looking for when you say that they are only recommending current treatments. I’ve seen a wide variety of treatments in pretty much every category I’ve looked at, and there have been several that I had to google to find out what it was - for instance, I had never heard of “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing” at all, but 33 people had tried it for anxiety and nine found it very helpful for anxiety.
At the bottom of each survey page, there should be a link “symptom/treatment/cause not listed?” - you can click on that to add your own. The good is that you can add what you found worked… the bad is that so can other people. I’m hoping that at least for treatments, the crowd will eventually winnow out the truly ineffective ones.
This is so vague and general as to be useless from a real research standpoint - and waay to open to spoofing and sockpuppeting by people with agendas. It doesn’t help they misspell names of medications and treatments throughout the site. There’s also no differentiation in all the questionnaires and surveys for symptoms by gender - and we know there are many health conditions where men and women have different symptoms. I’d class this site as a game or a toy and not anything really useful for someone looking for reliable information or help.