Treatment tips

Nicholas Albery

There needs to be an organisation to which anyone suffering from a particular disease can write in with tips for fellow sufferers as to what has helped him or her, apart from the normal drugs.

'You would be sent all the suggestions for your disease'

We need to take advantage of 'ordinary' people's experience. They live with a disease day-to-day and are quite likely to develop little initiatives that help. Self-help groups can spread this kind of information too, but I imagine a situation where you would be sent a computer print-out of all the best positive suggestions for your particular complaint, which would also record the number of respondents who claimed to have (or to have not) been helped by each suggestion - with perhaps formalised questionnaires for particular suggestions. You would pay for this service, although perhaps less if sending in suggestions of your own at the same time. The organisation would edit the suggestions, adding comments, excluding those that were known to be harmful, keeping a watchful eye on manufacturers' publicity attempts, and keeping in close contact with the main organisations dealing with each disease. At the bottom of each print-out would be a list of relevant reading material and the names and addresses of self-help groups.

This could be a more useful experience for some than attending a self-help group. In the print-out a sufferer would only be exposed to positive suggestions, whereas in a self-help group the suggestible may find themselves adopting the symptoms of fellow sufferers.

A more orthodox version of this Treatment Tips proposal would be a computer network for doctors' surgeries, where a patient who has just been given a particular diagnosis, could be given an up-to-the-minute print-out of a clear explanation of the disease and of useful treatments, detailed warnings connected with any prescribed medicines or with infectiousness, any good self-help tips, and the addresses of self-help groups. Often these are matters that a new sufferer would like to know and to explore, but which a doctor might be unlikely to have the time to talk about fully.

Computer diagnosis in the waiting room

There could also be very user-friendly computers in waiting rooms with expert diagnosis software. Patients would respond to the computer's questions about their symptoms, and the doctor seeing them subsequently would have fuller information than he or she could extract in the normal brief encounter.

Nicholas Albery, 20 Heber Road, London NW2 6AA (tel 081 208 2853; fax 081 452 6434).

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