The Is My Cancer Different? campaign urges patients to ask their doctors a crucial question — is my cancer different? — and provides powerful information on why, when and how it could matter to their treatment choices.

Presented in video format and featuring cancer survivors, physicians, scientists, advocates and Ronnie Andrews, the president of Clarient, the personalized medicine campaign covers what indivdualized cancer treatment means, what makes a patient’s cancer different, treatment decisions, expert insights and more.

Genetic Alliance, a non-profit health advocacy organization, has started an initiative to empower the public with regard to family health history, called Does It Run In The Family. Because family health history provides individuals and their health care providers with important information about disease risk, doctors advise patients to collect information from their family members. However, few patients actually collect and maintain this information

From Does It Run In The Family:

In 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a survey of over 4,000 people. Ninety-seven percent (97%) thought that it is important to know your family health history. But only 30% had ever collected health information from their family members!…Genetic Alliance and partners created the Does It Run In the Family tool to help people collect their family health history information and share it with relatives and healthcare providers. The goal of the booklets is for individuals, families, and communities to use their new knowledge about family health history to increase their communication about health and become healthier people.

By helping patients know which questions to ask family members — and by putting information online and eliminating the need to send paper records back and forth — Does It Run In The Family aims to make collecting a family history a relatively painless part of the health care process.

Source: Does It Run In The Family

Earlier this year, About.com conducted a research study on health, revealing that significantly more people find online health advertisements helpful in coping with diseases and learning about the side effects and safety of medication [1]. The study confirms that people are turning to the Internet to take charge of their health and to better educate themselves about conditions and treatment options.