Show HN: Crowdsource your optimal health stack
Dear HN, I’m proud to present healthstack.app, an idea I’ve been working on for over a year and what I hope will be my life’s work as I continue enhancing it with an extensive roadmap of ideas. I made this with a friend partly out of my own personal need to keep track of my therapies after a couple accidents, but also as the basis of a greater vision for an intentional research-oriented community that provides continual value to those fighting all sorts of conditions, from something as grave as, say, cancer to something as ubiquitous and benign as aging.

Keeping on the lighter note of aging, I’ve tested it on perhaps the biggest stack ever, the one from Bryan Johnson’s blueprint site [0]. Healthstack surfaces nearly 40 potential interactions that stack introduces. It also shows if any of the substances used are contraindicated with any of your conditions. Lastly, you’ll see a log of someone’s activity, including rich-text journal posts. Viewing a page for a substance, procedure, or condition links to relations on it (e.g., which conditions people who use a substance have). And if you just need to check interactions without signing up, Healthstack provides that too [1].

I know that publishing your health info publicly can feel weird, but it’s not without positive precedent. I have seen reddit, facebook, telegram, and twitter communities as well as sites like stuffthatworks where people do so to collaborate and help others fighting the same conditions, and it has personally helped me to see others’ successes, mistakes, and research. I’ve shared my own experiences there and made people second-guess things they were deciding on with added info about complications and alternatives. I want to take the good things from those and improve on the not-so-constructive things—for example, I’ve seen some of these communities where people feel lost and without hope because they just can’t find info. I have a big feature planned to address just that.

Very importantly, please don’t do anything just because you see it on Healthstack. I think so much of the value of something like it is in provoking you to come up with questions and ideas to ask your doctors about, so you can shrink the huge power- and information-differential that often exists in such a relationship. Reading the experiences of others should help you feel empowered that you know how to get the info you are after, whether that is insisting on a test to be performed, bringing up the potential complications of something and asking how you can minimize them, or just knowing to seek a second opinion when things don’t line up. A single doctor will rarely have all the answers, but in conjunction with Healthstack I suspect you can be a much more informed patient than you would be with just one of the two.

Even if you aren’t interested in the community features, I think Healthstack is valuable enough as the living health record you own. Access to it is not contingent on continual health-insurance coverage that gives access to your health-provider portal, and you can record your own notes. How many times have you shown up for a doctor’s appointment and been asked to provide all your medications and health history and struggled to think of them? I know that won’t be a problem for me anymore [2].

I welcome any and all feedback here, in the site’s feedback form, at the email in the site’s privacy policy, or on this Trello card [3]. Be aware that the first time any particular query for a substance, condition, or procedure is searched, the request will take longer than usual since it hits a couple external APIs to store data. Take this time to revel in the fact that you were the first one to think to search something :)

[0] https://www.healthstack.app/u/MildArchaicGibbs

[1] https://www.healthstack.app/check

[2] https://www.healthstack.app/u/WintryRudeHowe

[3] https://trello.com/c/CpwpwPsr/3-other-features-write-a-comme...