Background

Modern healthcare sadly often gets lost in translation. Never before has so much information been available at just the click of a button but it is often so difficult to make sense of this information and distil out what is useful and what is just noise. Internet search engines and social media represent a tool which humans will inevitably use to try to make better decisions about their health and identify when it is going wrong.

The risk of course, noted by many patients, is that researching one’s own symptoms can lead to frightening yet inaccurate assumptions, which can in turn often lead to interactions with health professionals which are sub optimal at best or lead to downright dangerous and unnecessary medicines and invasive investigations at worst, when used outside of their correct context.

It often feels that modern medicine has been reduced to a process of looking up symptoms online and then visiting whichever Doctor when it is convenient to get the test, medicine, sick note or specialist to address the issue. While this can sometimes be effective when an individual has arrived at the correct hypothesis beforehand, when it goes wrong, it can have troubling consequences.

Our Vision & Mission

Let’s turn this on its head. Why don’t we look at this as an opportunity? Rather than, as health practitioners chastising people for performing research about their health concerns, lets take note that, people clearly want to take more of a role in managing their own health.

Our vision is that health practitioners are finally able to create and make use of resources that can truly support individuals to become specialists not just in their own health, but in the health and wellbeing of the community around them. After all, it has been known for a long time that proactive shared decision making between patients and their doctor results in the best outcomes.

For this to happen, we need to think about how we approach our health and how we interact with our healthcare providers. There might be the perfect solution to our problem but we just don’t know about it yet.

Our mission is to get us all listening to one another and supporting one another to truly understand what is objectively true, and use that to inform what is helpful. For all of us, it is about truly seeking to understand what we might have misunderstood rather than demanding that we get our point across and make other people understand us. It is about being tolerant of people who may see things differently to ourselves rather than allowing ourselves to get drawn into an inaccurate tribalistic echo chamber paradigm where our self worth is measured by how many people we can get to affirm our world view.

Using this new understanding we will make great, our collective understanding of our own and our communities’ health. It is however, not about getting rid of the consultation. See it more of a means of enhancing it.

What is HealthEggs?

HealthEggs is a community health engagement platform to be built around the principles of shared understanding, sustainable community growth, co-creation and mutual benevolence. There’s more to achieving good health than pills and scalpels.

When we can make it so, we’d love you to join us as an individual, a health practitioner, an other enterprise that can add value. We have some great plans for the future, but Rome wasn’t built in a day and there are loads of things to get our heads around before taking the plunge and putting out an MVP (minimum viable product) into the world!.

For now, we have put together a platform to make some use of the time you will unfortunately, inevitably, have to spend in the waiting room. Your health practitioner has put together a collection of videos and resources which they believe and hope will help you make an improved understanding of what is achievable.