What's WWDD, you ask. That's one of my HUGEST inventions, I guess. It is ingenious in its simplicity. I am sure that I am re-inventing it, since I can not believe than nobody though of it earlier! It's so trivial and useful!
But let start from the story behind my idea. For those who have no patience and want actually to know what my ingenious idea actually is, please look deeper (down) in this post.
The background to my invention.So here it goes. As usual, one evening I went to the swimming pool. Happy and gay after 10 swimming rounds in the pool, I went to the shower to wash myself from chlorine. I took off my swimming suite - and - oh my God! What do I see?! My whole body is covered by violet little oval spots all over! Have never seen anything of this kind!
"Don't panic", I said to myself. I wrapped myself into a towel, dried a bit, put on my clothes and ran home. At home I examined the spots closer. When the skin got dry and warm, the spots turned into pinkish. That was PLANTY of them!
I started to search the web on what the hell could that be. It took me around half an hour of trial and error till I have established several possibilities - one of them was
Pityriasis Rosea The very next morning I rushed to a doctor, who confirmed my educated guess. Actually from surfing the web I already understood that there is no cure against it - you simply wait 3-4 months and the spots disappear, but yet I hoped that the doctor will give me some lotion or anything to make it disappear faster. But no, he just smiled and said to wait. Not to make any sweating sports, not to swim for a while, and it will go away.
My main concern was that it will move towards my face and hands. Well, finally it did not, but yet, I was rather depressed. During this period I scanned internet for more cases, and
here I found a story from a guy which actually completely calmed me down. And
here I read a nice educated article on Pityriasis Rosea. So now as of time of writing, after around 2 months, it is slowly disappearing from my body.
But...
(
Here comes the WWDD explanation for those who opted to skip the background above):
The internet search and the stuff that I learned about this disease (for instance, that people have no idea where this Pityriasis Rosea is coming from and where it is going), made me think...
Somebody (well, not me... I am a bit too busy even for writing this blog... So
somebody else) should create a (free!) World Wide Disease Database (
WWDD). But not only a WWDD which includes the disease description, history and treatment possibilities. This we can find in Wikipedia without any special WWDD. The WWDD should be a data-bank with a statistical input from the diseased people.
For example, you go to your doctor and the doctor says that you have a Pityriasis Rosea. You come back home, open the database, and fill in the questionnaire in the WWDD which includes thousands of related and seemingly unrelated questions.
Some statisticians (and I am sure that there will be a lot of those, for example, hired by pharmaceutical companies) will do some work on that data and may be eventually the CAUSES and the TREATMENT will be clarified! Good for me, good for you, good for the human kind.
So this is what I, as a freshly (almost) cured Pityriasis Rosea survivor, will suggest as the possible questionnaire questions for this specific disease:
1. Time of the year that you got the disease
2. Temperatures outside (well not everywhere in the world January means snow. If you live in Australia I guess it would be rather hot...)
3. Your age.
4. Your country (that will help to establish the frequency of certain diseases around the world! - However, provided that THE SAME questionnaire is translated equally to all of the languages. And provided that in different countries the internet access of the people is equal. I mean, one should take into account that in some countries every 100th family has an internet access, while in some others, every family has at least one computer per family member :)
4. Is that the first time that you got this disease?
5. Have you been under stress lately (school/university examinations, divorce, etc - may be even I would let a specific field for the options).
6. Have you been doing sports lately? If yes, which ones?
7. Have you been visiting public swimming pools, public saunas, or other public places where you could suspect being infected (this question is important even if it is presently NOT believed that the disease can be transported by skin contact/air). Please specify.
8. Did you have Chickenpox earlier in your life?
(There must be more questions of this type, with different diseases, in order to make relations to different diseases/viruses that might be silent in your body for a long time but activate themselves suddenly in various ways)
9. Do you have any lip herpes on your lips from time to time?
10. What is your blood type? (Well, I have no idea about mine, but may be it also could help?)
11. Have you been using new type of skin lotions lately? If yes, which? (There should be also a general question on lotions and body cosmetics that might have been used lately).
12. Did you infect so far people who are living with you (your kids, your sex partner, so on)...
Well, there are many more questions that one may be interested in. There should be a possibility of the diseased people to suggest their own new questions, which they believe might be relevant. This should be a dynamic data base, accessible to all the people from the globe.
Here are several rules and concerns regarding the WWDD:
A. Every new data input should be automatically translated to all of the languages, so that an update will be simultaneous for the database statisticians. Likewise, every new questionnaire entry, every new form field, should be translated immediately so that the diseased people will be able to fill that entry in.
B. There should be a severe personal data protection, and a full anonymity of the person who fills in his data.
C. Because of B, it would be hard to detect the spammers. But I guess that the importance of such knowledge should be clear to everybody. Sooner or later, we all get the same diseases all around us. We all want to know the cure. Or at least where the disease is coming from, so that we could protect ourselves.
D. The statistic data should be available to any statistician in the world, be it an amateur or a professional one. There should be a public forum where they can discuss and share their thoughts about the data.
E. The doctors over the world should be aware of the WWDD and should recommend their patients to fill in the forms as soon as they find it appropriate.
F. There should be a possibility of a diseased person to update his own data. For instance, if in the beginning the patient says that his kids were not infected, but after a year the patient's kid gets the same disease, the earlier diseased parent should be able to update his/her entry from one-year ago (or earlier) in suspicion that he/she might have transferred the disease nonetheless.
G. The problem may arise when several entries/names exist for the same disease. To prevent it, every person should be asked to clarify his physician's opinion and to receive from the physician the
latin name for the disease. Likewise, the patient should receive the most common names in his/her language, and fill in the certain fields in the form accordingly. Also, the statisticians who are doing the work with the data should be aware of multiple naming and proceed accordingly.
The question may arise: Why not to let an interviewing doctor to fill in such a form professionally? Well, that's because I do not want my doctor to know everything about me. I might be more frank filling my data on my own rather than sharing with the doctor some input which might seem irrelevant to myself (which would be the case of some questions in the form, of cause!)
Well, that's it so far regarding the WWDD! That's much more to it, but I will leave it for executive people - whoever will volunteer. I am just sharing my ideas here :)
This picture is also taken from decluttered.com. Isn't it amazing?! Perfect solution for all those wires! And it's beneath your table!
