Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2009, 6 502 Table 1. Cont. I’m Too Young for This Youth with cancer ES&IS http://www.imtooyoungforthis.org CareFlash, http://www.careflash.com Personal webpages to share health ES&IS Care Pages, http://www.carepages.com updates with family and friends WeAreDiabetic.org, WeAreCeliac.org General/support: 14 communities ES&IS http://weare.us Physician social networks Sermo General: free membership to verified N&I http://www.sermo.com physicians Medscape Physician Connect General: free membership to verified N&I http://www.medscape.com physicians http://tiny.cc/pRhuj (detail) Asklepios General: Canadian physician N&I http://www.asklepios.ca networking and collaboration tool MedicalExchange MEDTING Online research, publishing and case N&I, Collaboration http://www.medting.com collaboration with images and videos OR-Live Online surgical and health care video N&I, Collaboration http://www.or-live.com and webcast communication platform The Doctor’s Channel Doctors learning from each other via Education http://www.thedoctorschannel.com short streaming video clips Additional medical industry physician and scientist social networks: http://scienceroll.com/2008/05/24/community-sites-for-scientists-and-physicians-the-list A second class of patient-focused health social networks is cause-specific, offering primarily the basic emotional support and information sharing service. Physician-focused health social networks are also starting to have a presence, both for the usual industry-related networking but also as collaboration platforms, notably the Medical Image and Video Exchange (http://www.medting.com) which in December 2008 had over 2,011 cases with 17,812 images and videos uploaded and available for collaboration, and OR-Live, which presents live interactive webcasts of surgical procedures to physicians, patients and the public. 2.2. Consumer Personalized Medicine 2.2.1. Consumer personalized medicine introduction In the last several decades, advances in science have been enabling new paradigm understandings of biological life. Molecular biology was one such key shift, genomics is another that is occurring now, and proteomics, metabolomics and any or all of the other twenty “omics” fields (http://omics.org) may further revolutionize the understanding and management of all biological processes. Current unsolved disease states such as cancer are complex and expressed differently in diverse groups of patients. Initially, it is easiest to tackle cases where the patients have certain characteristics or the disease is expressed in certain ways. Therefore therapies are targeted to sub-groups of patients, for example Imatinib for certain chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) patients and Tamoxifen for certain breast cancer patients. It is starting to be realized that obtaining and understanding a whole new level of detailed individual biological information could be necessary for advances in both institutional medicine and patient- driven medicine. The required information is starting to be known to the consumer and is increasingly available publicly, without the individual needing to wait for a condition to advance to the stage of