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In Our Own Hands: How Patients Are Reinventing Medicine opens with an urgent question posed by desperate patients and their families: can new technologies help us treat and prevent the most alarming and perhaps understated health threat that we face? Chronic diseases now affect over 130 million Americans and cost countless billions of healthcare dollars.

Through the stories of the impassioned, often defiant struggles of the film’s three central characters—all with complex, unresolved medical issues— In Our Own Hands explores the emergence of “participatory medicine”, enabled by a host of groundbreaking technologies that put more data about our own biological, behavioral and environmental ecosystems into our hands (and often onto our phones) than ever before possible.

We meet families who are single-handedly shifting long-standing medical paradigms, revolutionizing established treatment protocols, building social medicine networks, and supporting new open clinical and research systems— all to find answers for themselves and their children now.

We hear from thought leaders like Dr. Eric Topol, author of best seller "The Creative Destruction of Medicine," who speaks to the impact empowered patients are having on medicine as we know it; as well as a fascinating group of experts who help explain how personal genomics, a staggering list of environmental influences, and our own personal life choices combine to create health and illness. Diseases, though seemingly distinct, may be interconnected on a systems level, with answers for one illness influencing the science of another.

In Our Own Hands shows viewers the birth of this “Citizen Science” movement, and introduces a few of the courageous, imaginative individuals who are ushering in a new age of Digital Medicine. This film will change the way you think about illness and medicine’s role in keeping us well.