Would a centralized treatment "voting form" be useful?
Very Useful - 12.5% - 1 votes
Somewhat Useful - 25.0% - 2 votes
No Opinion - 12.5% - 1 votes
Somewhat Harmful - 0.0% - 0 votes
Very Harmful - 0.0% - 0 votes
Gee, maybe we could somehow use *this* polling function - 50.0% - 4 votes
sca721
Regular Member
Joined : Jun 2004
Posts : 54
Posted 8/15/2013 3:55 AM (GMT 0)
System Admins and/or moderators,
This is a great board but one of its shortcomings is that the many possible treatments (prescription and OTC) of UC are discussed and evaluated in dozens of different, isolated threads.
It would be amazing if some sort of voting form/database could be incorporated into the site - a single point of contact where everyone's individual treatment experience could be entered and then tabulated and republished.
Imagine something along the lines of the following (hopefully my formatting survives):
Very Somewhat No Some Very
Helpful Helpful Effect Harm Harmful
1 2 3 4 5
Asacol o o o o o
Azulfidine o o o o o
Delzicol o o o o o
Psyllium o o o o o
etc
etc
etc
The data so entered could then be aggregated and ideally responses could be tied back to individual posters so that individualized followup questions could be asked.
Has anyone ever kicked such an idea around?
It is too bad that so much collective wisdom currently goes, well, uncollected under the system now in place - it is just too difficult to search/summarize dozens and dozens of individual threads and the data points they contain.
Ideally, posters could also post proposed new treatments for inclusion on the voting form.
Just a thought - and thank you for the volunteer work you already put in.
sca721
Regular Member
Joined : Jun 2004
Posts : 54
Posted 8/15/2013 4:04 AM (GMT 0)
Argh - my formatting didn't survive.
I had never used the polling function before - something along the lines of what I proposed might be kludged together by
1) making each individual treatment option its own thread,
2) including an efficacy poll on that thread,
3) and then grouping all the "treatment threads" together in a frozen location on the board.
It would be bulky and not too pretty but it might work to centralize/aggregate treatment efficacy data in a single location (without having to try to integrate new software).
Just a thought.
quincy
Elite Member
Joined : May 2003
Posts : 33769
Posted 8/15/2013 2:49 PM (GMT 0)
It wouldn't be useful. We interact here to find the info.
q
Posted 8/15/2013 4:31 PM (GMT 0)
It seems like the more you try to make sense of this disease the more you realize that it just doesn't make any sense. There are so many variables I don't know if you could actually trust any data you generated from it. It seems like the doctors have already done that with only moderate success.
sca721
Regular Member
Joined : Jun 2004
Posts : 54
Posted 8/17/2013 6:22 AM (GMT 0)
Hmm,
I guess my point is that all the collective experiences of board members are spread through hundreds of individual threads - defeating any attempt at a comprehensive overview (whether "correct" or not).
It seems to me that a centralized data page, summarizing everyone's experience with a variety of medications (pharma and OTC) would be tremendously useful for someone systematically working their way through a range of possible solutions.
Sure, medical research does the same thing (hello Pubmed) but there are conflict of interest issues as well as small sample sizes.
Here we have a fairly large number of personally affected, highly motivated individuals who can communicate their personal experiences.
All we lack is some degree of summarized clarity.
Personally, I can't really see the downside.