Joe and Terry Graedon, long-time friends of “Doc Tom” Ferguson, produce The People’s Pharmacy, a website and radio program on NPR. Last Saturday’s program was about the Society for Participatory Medicine, which they helped to found in 2009. (They were also among Doc Tom’s advisors on the e-patient white paper.)

The full program (one hour) is available on their site through May 21. Participants:

• Pediatrician and SPM co-chair Alan Greene, MD, of DrGreene.com, speaks about how he changed his practice (and went online) in the 1990s to provide better care in the face of a changing insurance environment. His site has had 75 million visits. His wife Cheryl runs the site and is also an SPM founder.
• SPM president Dr. Danny Sands and I describe my case, and how participatory medicine empowers both healthcare provider as well as the patient.

Finding a patient community:

ACOR: The program mentions ACOR.org, the nextwork of cancer patient communities that Dr. Sands recommended I join. The bad news is that the ACOR website is currently down. The good news is that you don’t actually need the website – you only need the mailing addresses for its individual cancer mailing lists.

Here is the full list of ACOR mailing lists. Click the one you want and you’ll get a page with instructions for joining the list. (ACOR is not a website, it’s a set of mailing lists.  You simply send an email to the list you want, as explained on those pages.)

Other communities: I’ve long thought that one of the best things the Society for Participatory Medicine could do is maintain a list of patient communities, searchable by disease. Who wants to work on that?  Help:

• Join the society: www.participatorymedicine.org/join-us
• To volunteer, write to volunteer at participatorymedicine.org