Taking a leaf from Bob Hickey's book, a 9-year-old boy's mother launched an eBay auction to help pay for a pricey biopsy on a brain tumor her son David (below) had nicknamed "Frank."

When word got out on the Internet street, Dr. Hrayr Shahinian of the Skull Base Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles (dare I mention that Cedars is part of the UCLA School of Medicine, my alma mater? Go Bruins! But I digress) said he'd do the procedure for free, Tiffini Dingman-Grover, David's mom, said yesterday.

So I guess you won't be able to bid any more for the bumper sticker saying "Frank Must Die," which would have gone to the auction's winner.

In my opinion, what we see here, and in the case of Internet-enabled organ transplants, are nothing other than the first cracks in the ground, heralding an earthquake of titanic magnitude in health care and how it happens, catalyzed and enabled by the Internet and the disintermediation of the grand panjandrums who for too long have held our well-being in their overpaid hands.

Wait and see: you ain't seen nuttin' yet.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I did the equivalent of an Internet campaign for a dying child; she lived.

I wrote a book about it.

Though sales in the U.S. only totaled a few thousand, it's sold over 100,000 copies in its German translation.

Just goes to show that it's not just the book, but what the publisher does with it, that makes or breaks a title.

Clearly, my German publisher put a lot more wood behind the arrow.

Article Author: bookofjoe

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