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Health
on the Web
Weekend
August 4/5, 2001
At 35 years old, Gregory Smith was an accomplished Harvard educated lawyer, a successful author and about to die. He says, “I went to a doctor and he said, ‘well you've got this brain tumor and it's incurable and you've got three to six months to live.’”
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But Greg was unwilling to accept the doctor's death sentence. He says, “They didn't have a crystal ball, they just had odds. And if they were odds, odds can be beaten.”
Greg went on an exhausting mission to save his life. Over
100 phone calls to doctors, letters, trips to the library,
and finally he found an experimental treatment that saved
his life.
Fifteen years later Greg's tumor is under control, but not gone. His fifteen-year search for a treatment continues. But now, thanks to the Internet revolution, that search is a lot easier. He says, “The web is a godsend to patients. Before I would have had to go through 15 people to get that information. Now all that information is at your fingertips.”
He's talking about web pages like AOL’s WebMD.
The Internet became Melissa Holley's lifeline. Today it’s
a miracle she's walking. After breaking her back in a
car accident, doctors told her she was paralyzed for life.
Her father, Roy, told “48 Hours” he was going to prove the doctors wrong. He was determined to become his own medical expert. He logged on and found a highly experimental procedure across the world in Israel to repair her spinal cord. Thanks to the World Wide Web, Melissa was the first person in the world to go through the revolutionary operation.
Less than a year later, Melissa has some feeling in her legs and can lift them slightly.
She joins the growing number of people who have beaten the odds thanks to high-tech help in cyberspace.
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