It took: Lucien Engelen, Berci Mesko, Larry Chu, Sean Ahrens, Roberto Ascione, myself Denise Silber, and first and foremost the patient herself, but one single tweet did change a life and remarkably so!
Here is the story.
In the fall of 2010, someone in the United States, whom I didn't know of or meet until recently, suddenly developed an inflammatory bowel disease, colitis. Her life was turned upside down as she dealt with this new medical problem that was constantly present. She asked her physician if any food allergy could explain her problem. He said no. And so the colitis went on.
In the fall of 2010, I went to Maastricht in the Netherlands to attend
Lucien Engelen and Gunther Eysenbach's Medicine 2.0. There, Dr Larry Chu
from Stanford was scouting for speakers for Medicine 2.0 2011 in Palo
Alto. Berci Mesko spoke to him about me. (You can see that Berci and Lucien know each other and also enjoyed Paris's Doctors 2.0 & You).
And so in September 2011, off I flew to San Francisco, on my way to
Palo Alto for Medicine X. Larry Chu and I quickly realized that our two
events, Medicine X and Doctors 2.0 & You, were based on the same
philosophy and would be natural partners.
Denise Silber, Larry Chu
Also attending
Medicine X was Sean Ahrens, founder of the Crohnology community. We had a
great chat. After the conference, Larry and his team produced a beautiful video interview of Sean, interesting for both its substance and the style.
Back in Paris to prepare for Doctors 2.0 & You 2012, a new partnership came up, with the brand new video platform, Videum that facilitates translation automatically and by volunteers. We chose the Sean Ahren's interview to open the plenary and project it off of Videum for the subtitles. When the video came on in Paris, Roberto Ascione of Razorfish (then Publicis), father of the platform, tweeted the Videum link.

One of Roberto's twitterfollowers from Razorfish was the colitis patient. She saw the link, watched the film, and discovered that a gluten allergy could indeed explain her symptoms. Two weeks later, she was back to normal! I did not know the person with "the story", until we met recently, 7 months after the conference to talk about Doctors 2.0 & You 2013. When I described how the conference in 2012 had opened with a video on Videum, she said, "Oh, I have a story to tell you about that video, that "cured me" And so I learned how one tweet had changed a life for the better, with all due thanks to Lucien, Berci, Larry, Sean, Roberto, and, well, me and the patient.
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