The Community Factor

The title of the site says it: Patients Like Me. The purpose of the site is to find others like you, but how do you find them? First, you enter your conditions/diagnoses into your profile, then you click the "Patients" tab at the top. You can filter your searches (hopefully your condition has many patient users that come up as a match) to find people even more like you (age, gender, etc). After that, you can contact them directly.

More interestingly still, there is a "forum" tab next to the other tab, and in this tab there is a goldmine of patient communication. You can choose to go into one of the "rooms" associated with different categories of conditions such as mental health, or endocrine, or you can simply visit the general "Patients Like Me" room where everyone can talk about anything. Threads begin and can go on for two posts, or pages upon pages of posts, much like any other message board or forum. This suggests a great level of depth because the posts tend to be long, and involve a lot of response to people's posts within the posts. Though the posts are in indented and don't allow for specific replies, people find a way to reply to either the thread beginner or another used within the thread. Here is an example of an ongoing forum post: