“They lived their lives as if their sights were set on the clouds beyond the hill they were climbing.”

Akira Kurosawa

I am reminded of Japanese movie director Kurosawa’s quote every time I get to see all my colleagues together.

As different as we are, as our skills are, as our personal outlooks are, all of our sights are set on the clouds beyond the horizon.  We are creating a cornucopia of patient education and support programs that cover the complex issues in myeloma for different ways of learning.

Each one is linked to the HealthTree Cure Hub.  It puts together essential information to help patients learn to make the best decisions for themselves in consultation with their medical teams.

HealthTree Cure Hub is a growing source of diverse data for researchers.  It may well be an important key to help unlock doors to a greater longevity, better quality of life and possibly a cure.

It is already proving to be a success on both counts.  It is likely creating a treasure trove of data for research ideas and potential that can’t be visualized today.

But without you, it doesn’t work.  We need you to participate.  To update your profile.  To reach out to your fellow patients and explain the benefits to them.  To share the information with your health care team.

The more patients maintain a Cure Hub profile, the greater the opportunity will be for the entire community.  Currently, more than 11,000 profiles are in the system.  If we could increase that two-, three-, or four-fold, it would create one of the richest myeloma data bases in existence.

Currently, the largest myeloma clinical trials have between 500-1000 patients and cost tens of millions of dollars.  Imagine how quickly and cheaply research could be done if the data of 1000 patients could be separated from the entire pool of profiles and analyzed at a small fraction of the normal costs.  Moreover, it could be more quickly applied to better drugs and procedures.

So, if you have considered making a financial donation for research, consider investing your data into a HealthTree Cure Hub profile.  It will benefit you immediately and your experience might be key in helping researchers to find better treatments.

In the long-term, the hope is to kill the disease before myeloma cells even become noticeable.  Imagine a day when people who might have developed myeloma will never have heard of the disease because their doctors took care of it at the MGUS or earlier stage.  Researchers are realistically imagining exactly such a scenario as you read this.

The mission of the HealthTree Foundation can be easily seen in every one of its programs; it is the sum of our ambitions, which is much bigger than that sum of the parts we can currently see.  It’s beyond the horizon.

Consider joining your fellow patients so that we can all reach it together.

That would be a revolution.

(Part 5 of 5)