Last week I was lucky enough to go to the Health 2.0 Conference (http://www.Health20con.com) and hear an engaging and sometimes shocking panel featuring patient bloggers. Time has proven the concept that patients need to tell their stories, and others with the same diagnosis need to hear them.

I am constantly confronted by the lack of good, consumer-generated health information for women. Just last week, when I blogged about my cataract surgery, I got responses from all over the world telling me that they were forwarding my entry to fathers, mothers, uncles, friends, etc. The same thing happened with my hip replacement blog, which is still out there helping people who want to know what to expect from that surgery.

This morning we saw all the sites that can help patients communicate with each other. But this afternoon, we are seeing tools to help doctors connect.

Here’s something that could be helpful to all of us. On a new site, Careseek nurses, doctors and patients can rate doctors. Nurses can sign up and rate the doctors they work with on a separate site that protects their anonymity.

There’s a sold out crowd in the room to hear how Web 2.0 will impact health care. David Brailer, who last time I heard him at an SLHI conference was the Bush administration’s National Health Information Technology coordinator and now heads a CALPers sponsored venture fund, Health Evolution Partners, has said that there is a pent-up demand for community and communication in health care, and that Web 2.0 has harnessed that.

The panel on Social Media for Patients at Health 2.0 is awesome. There are already many good Web2.0 resources out there for patients. Here are some of them.

Diabetes Mine is an advocacy blog for people with diabetes.

Jerry Groopman, a doctor who also writes for The New Yorker, has written a great book on how and why doctors misdiagnose 15% of illnesses, and he finds it’s because of the way they are trained. The name of the book is How Doctors Think, and it explains how certain decision trees lead doctors down certain paths, eliminating potential causes of illness that may actually be the real causes.

I’m reading the new expose of the vitamin and supplement industry, “Natural Causes,” by Dan Hurley. For someone who doesn’t have much faith in the medical establishment, this book is a real bummer. Now I can’t have any faith in the natural remedies, either. Hurley tells the story of the original “snake oil,” and exposes Adele Davis (whose nutrition advice I followed when I was pregnant). According to him, Adele Davis heavily footnoted all her books to make herself look knowledgeable and scholarly.

About two years ago, after a lifetime of running, aerobics, yoga, tennis, and everything else you can think of to keep fit, I found myself suddenly limping, in a lot of pain, and losing my quality of life. When I went to my (male) family doctor, he told me to get a hip replacement. He said it just like that: “time for a hip replacement.”

No discussion of the risks, none of the fact that there’s a long recovery, nothing about the perils of general anaesthesia. It may as well have been “replace the spark plugs.”

About a month ago, I got a Pap smear from my family physician. Although I have already received the bill from the lab, I still haven’t gotten the results from my doctor’s office. Last week, I had a mammogram. Mayo Clinic said they will send me a letter with the results. This kind of waiting and relying on the overburdened staff at the doctors’ offices is annoying, So guess what I’m going to do?

There were a lot of offline responses to my post on electronic health records, all from patients who were desperate to have their records somewhere they could see them. For these people, I recommend storing your own records on Passport MD or Revolution Health. At least if your records, insofar as you have them, are stored somewhere, you can access them yourself. The problem is, you have to ask for copies of all your labs and superbills and take the time to scan them and upload them. That’s a drag, unless you are very dedicated, very technical, or have a large staff.