Vote for Healthline!

Good grief, it’s been some time since I’ve worked on a product that was eligible to win an industry award, but here we have it.

A few weeks back, Healthline was honored with a “Gold” (first place) World Wide Web Health Award. And, we’re in the running for a Consumer Directed Health Care Award, to be announced in early May. Very cool.

I also just found out that we’ve been nominated for a Webby Award (for Best Health Site)! I spent the whole first wave of the dot-com scene building kickass products (if I say so myself, LOL!) and not once did our Marketing folks have the good sense to submit our site… thankfully the Healthline crew is quite a bit sharper.

We’re nominated in the Living->Health category (makes sense). You can vote for Healthline after completing the registration process. (I hate to beg, but I’d definitely appreciate your support, be it voting yourself and/or sharing this post with your readers if you think they’d be interested.)

And while clearly it’s nice to be recognized for one’s work with awards and what not, the reality of what we’re doing was never clearer to me than last Friday, when my step-dad was “unexpectedly” diagnosed with prostate cancer. I put “unexpectedly” in quotes… while he had (has) urinary hesitancy and his PSA was elevated, a) neither are unreasonable for his age, and b) I don’t know that you ever really “expect” to hear that you or a loved one has cancer.

Interestingly, the doctors immediately wanted to do a radical prostatectomy (remove his prostate gland). After spending some time on Healthline, he and mom pushed the docs for a bone scan (to see if the cancer has spread). Hopefully that’ll end up just being a “waste of time and money”, but it’s still amazing to me that their first reaction was to operate, rather than evaluate his whole situation…

Like it or not, no matter how well intentioned your doctor may be, your health is your own responsibility. Seems obvious, but I suspect it’s only appreciated with a bit of age and experience. At least in my case.

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One comment on “Vote for Healthline!
  1. Anonymous says:

    Whe does Healthline come out of Beta form?