College Students Start a Global Community for Health Issues
College Students Start a Global Community for Health IssuesNew York, NY – Zachary Katz, a Harvard College senior, and Jerel Chacko, a first year at New Jersey Medical School, have started a nonprofit business that aims to connect physicians and
College Students Start a Global Community for Health Issues
New York, NY – Zachary Katz, a Harvard College senior, and Jerel Chacko, a first-year at New Jersey Medical School, have started a nonprofit business that aims to connect physicians and patients around the world. Talk to Cure (www.talktocure.org) is the brainchild of Katz and Chacko, who have witnessed medical disparities between industrialized nations and developing ones. Having seen that patients in the developing world are often unable to access the emotional support that they need as well as the medical information freely available to patients in the United States, these two students recognized that they could provide a service which allows patients, without charge and under anonymity, to reach out to each other and to access knowledge from medical doctors outside their regions.
Talk to Cure is completely free and anonymous for its users. Once a member registers, he or she simply shares his or her experience in the online community. Users can either continue ongoing topics or make new ones personalized to their issues. Other users can reply publically or privately, enabling a steady flow of both technical medical information and personal advising. Doctors, termed “TalkDocs,” can offer a variety of services, ranging from recommendations of specialists to advice about living with the given medical condition. Doctors can also supplement their own medical expertise by communicating with physicians in other specialties, regions, or even countries. The community is unique in its global outlook; unlike other outlets available, this one focuses on bringing medical attention to the people who need it most rather than simply to those who can access it already.
Talk to Cure’s mission statement is to encourage patients in need to raise their voices rather than quell them. In doing so, they seek to provide a place for freely-flowing dialogue between members of the medical community – however well-known or not – to inform others of their experiences and seek or gain advice, from straightforward topics like a given medical drug to more nuanced ones, like dealing with grief. Also, while there are many other companies in the US who provide similar services, they usually do not aim to make their assistance globally available, and cannot offer the mode of personal conversation that Talk to Cure gives. For more information, please see Talk to Cure’s website at www.talktocure.org, or contact its Executive Director, Zachary Katz at 516.967.2065 or zacharykatz@talktocure.org.
