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Jordan comments on Med Patient Social Networks Are Better Scientific Institutions - Less Wrong
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Awesome.
Pie in the sky fantasizing:
What I'd really love to see is much cheaper and faster chemical/bio assays, something like a blood glucose monitor that could read out hormone levels, vitamin levels, hematocrit, etc. Something easy enough for millions of people to adopt and commit to on a daily basis. Throw it all into a giant database along with each participant's genome for good measure. The personal insights individuals could gain by comparing their data to the entire database would probably have a much more profound effect on health than a few decades worth of drug development -- of course, the tool would be invaluable for drug development as well.
What I would like are implantable bio-sensors that people could use to measure as much as possible about their physiology. I would love to have a device that can graph my blood sugar levels through the day, painlessly, or tell me any vitamins that I'm running low on, or warn about chronically elevated blood pressure. There's work being done on this sort of thing, with quite a lot of funding, so I expect this to become a reality soon, probably starting with soldiers.
By the way, the usual objection to any sort of monitoring implant chip is privacy. A simple solution would be to only transmit information from the implant via short-range infrared signals (PDF), with no radio capability at all.
Blood sugar can also be measured noninvasively through http://www.orsense.com/Glucose There no strong reason why their tool shouldn't be able to measure blood pressure, hemoglobin as well when they would have enough funding.
Vitamins are a bit more complicated as they appear in smaller quantities. I'm however not sure whether an implantable chip would do a better job at measuring vitamins. You can't easily refill chemicals in an implant. You can only transfer energy wirelessly (or you burn glucose). Energy allows you to run a centrifuge and a laser.
When you use implementable chips you won't be able to do fMRI on those patients anymore.
Yes, this is a beautiful vision. This would be a whole new way of doing medical science.
I'd love to see a lot more study of healthy people. I'm not convinced that what constitutes improvement in the factors that get measured is well understood.