Participatory Medicine: This is simply the concept that patients should be active participants in their own medical care and not passive recipients of treatments that they may not fully understand. That is the basic tenet of Participatory Medicine. But there are many forms of Participatory Medicine and various levels of activism and passion vis-à-vis how assertively (or as detractors might say, aggressively) to pursue it when it comes to patient-provider relations.

For instance, some advocates of Participatory Medicine lobby merely for better and wider application of standard patient education practices and greater awareness of possible health literacy concerns on the part of providers.

But Participatory Medicine also encompasses much more active forms of patient involvement in medical matters such as extensive use of personal health records (PHRs) to track one’s own health status and the expectation of online access to personal health data. And many of those with chronic and often life-threatening or life-changing illnesses become E-patients and engage in sophisticated research about their illnesses via participation in disease-specific electronic discussion lists and online patient communities.

Participatory Medicine now also encompasses patient-initiated and led clinical trials, sometimes under the auspices of an online patient community. This is something new on the clinical research landscape and it is not clear how the results will be regarded by the mainstream medical community or incorporated into the standard medical literature.

Participatory Medicine should not be confused with Personalized Medicine, the latter being concerned with the application of genomics and genetics and related developments to medical treatment, particularly pharmacological-based treatment. But as patients become ever more knowledgeable via the rise of the Web and Participatory Medicine they may start lobbying for more use of the techniques of Personalized Medicine in their own treatment. We are entering a new age when it comes to what the average person can learn about potential therapies and also what level of access to their medical records they expect from providers. Things may get a little tense from time to time out in medical land as ever more information becomes accessible online that patients will read and expect providers to address.