Our story

I started Turnto after our family was told there were “no treatment options” to help our son living with a rare type of Cerebral Palsy.

So of course - I did what we all do - and turned to good old Doctor Google, and discovered the amazing world of private Facebook groups. I remember finding this blog late one night, of some family trying an orthopaedic suit. I was so desperate to try something - that I just ordered this piece of equipment on the spot. Until that day, our son couldn’t sit. We put it on, and he sat for the first time. We took the suit off and he kept being able to sit. That was the moment we knew that there were things we could do to dramatically help our boys’ lives. But it was on us to find them.

And so began this epic quest to find more treatments for our kids. The crazy thing is that we did.

The things we were learning were already in the medical literature once I started digging.

We can’t afford to wait decades when we are living with these conditions today

When we are first diagnosed with a chronic illness - we are not equipped with the information to manage it. There is no magic pamphlet with answers to all the questions we have. We’re often told - ‘there is no cure, good luck, and goodbye’. The burden is on us - as patients - to understand how to manage our illnesses.

However, with 120 new medical papers being published every hour in biomedicine alone, nobody can keep up with this information overload. This is not to even mention that research states that it takes an average of 12 years for this medical research to translate into medical interventions.

This is too long.

“Every single day I log into facebook and scan all the comments. In case someone mentions a new treatment I have never heard of”

This is a story we hear every day. Low-cost and low-risk medical breakthroughs already exist. Many of them are lifestyle-based treatments. Academic papers and findings from clinical trials are generally available online, but not necessarily contextualized. Meanwhile, networks such as Facebook groups offer accounts of lived experiences and community support - but lack the searchability and academic credibility of research.

Instead of doom scrolling the internet, we want to transform the search experience from years into minutes.

I started Turnto so we don’t have to go through years of personal research to find a handful of life-changing treatments.

We want everybody to have them now.