I didn’t expect to be so taken by Larry Smarr’s 10 years worth of clinical data he’s collected on himself — perhaps more than anyone before him — even though I knew it led to an important diagnosis and provides a view of the future patient.

During the above demo at yesterday’s Quantified Self Public Health Symposium, he tells the story of how he has determined the relative amounts of various bacteria that live in the colons of healthy people, versus those with ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease. His own “micriobiome” is on the left in red, and matches the blue pattern of Crohn’s disease, and not the green of ulcerative colitis or purple of normals. He, not his initial doctors, figured this out.

Few people have the resources to do what he’s done, but this takes nothing away from the power of the story and that’s the part I can’t stop thinking about. He has also 3D printed the segment of his colon affected by disease, held here by Susannah Fox:

The picture directly above shows him holding the replica of his disease. “I have the problem in my grasp,” he says. This reminds me of the unstoppable passion we often see in parents of children with rare or undiagnosed diseases, and that one shouldn’t get between a mama bear and her cub. We have a tremendous opportunity in health care to tap into the motivation and innovation of patients and caregivers everywhere. Thank you, Larry, for the inspiration.

At bedtime, my daughter and I sometimes play word or number games instead of reading. The other night, she suggested we play a variant of Pictionary, where one of us thinks of a word and tries to get the other to guess it by drawing it. She also suggested we make it harder by having the drawer keep her eyes closed. I jokingly responded, what if we have the guesser keep his eyes closed? That led us to invent a game where the guesser indeed keeps his or her eyes closed, and the drawer limits what they can draw — first we did single digit numbers. It was fascinating and tons of fun to learn to LISTEN to what each number sounds like when written in pencil. (Pencils make much better sounds than pens.) Numbers consistently vary by how many strokes and the cadence of how the strokes are combined — each has a personality. Since I cross my sevens, four and seven sound almost the same, but the final line in seven is crisper and shorter than the final line in four.

We then had the nerve to guess which animal the other was drawing, limiting the options to a list of five. That was harder, but we learned to listen for a cat’s whiskers and a pig’s curly tail.

Here’s to being a better listener!