Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2009, 6 498 This transparency and willingness to interact helps to start changing the image of doctors as 10- minute diagnosticians to accessible collaborators in care. Many doctors are willing to answer questions and recommend next steps, and possibly provide a preliminary and well-caveated diagnosis. Even this basic mechanism of lightweight doctor-patient interaction could help ease burdens on the health care system. The conventional wisdom may have been that physicians would not take part for legal, reputational and other reasons but the key point is that they are willing to participate and in fact may find reputational enhancement and other benefits. Quantified self-tracking A third type of service offered by some health social networks (examples: PatientsLikeMe, CureTogether, MedHelp, SugarStats) is quantified self-tracking. The self-tracking functionality consists of easy-to-use data entry screens for condition, symptom, treatment and other biological information. The information can then be seen in a graphical display, possibly with views by individual, aggregated population or custom groups. Figure 5. PatientsLikeMe ALS profile charts example. For example, Figure 5 shows a detailed patient profile from PatientsLikeMe including disease progression, prescription drugs and symptom tracking for a 37 year-old male who has had ALS for six