The odds are that you haven't yet fully empowered your search for good health. I know this about you because a couple of months ago HealthCentral surveyed 2,888 of its registered members who have one of eight chronic conditions, including diabetes, and who completed the study. And in this respect at least people with diabetes are just like the people with the other seven chronic conditions.

HealthCentral CEO Christopher M. Schroeder and James E. Burroughs, associate professor of commerce at the University of Virginia, presented their findings at the DTC National Conference in Washington, D.C. earlier this month and shared them with me. After asking the people in the survey all sorts of standard psychological assessments, they found that about 30 percent of us take an active role in our health care plan. If you are in this group, one of your characteristics is that you are energized and engaged when you need to learn new tasks or master new subjects -- you are what the survey calls a person with a need for cognition. If you are an empowered health seeker, the other characteristic you have is self-confidence -- you have, in the formal terminology of the survey, high self-efficacy. 

You can click to view the study, "Understanding What Motivates the Empowered Patient," here. Mr. Schroeder and Professor Burroughs prepared it in association with Ted Smith, Ph.D., HealthCentral's executive vice president for research.

My posts here at HealthCentral and your many comments are just one small corner of this huge health resource. HealthCentral is a collection of condition and wellness websites providing clinical information, tools, and mobile applications. Its sites provide a platform for more than 3,000 bloggers, 200 expert patients, and more than 12 million monthly visitors sharing real-life experiences about specific conditions.

But those who are empowered are less than a third of of the registered members that HealthCentral surveyed. These are the people who ask for treatment and prepare for their doctor appointments. Then, half fall into the "traditional mainstream" category of people who have a low need for cognition and yet have high self-efficacy. Finally, 20 percent fall in the "traditional resistant" category with both a low need for cognition and low self-efficacy.

These proportions surprised me. I had always though that most of you already took charge of your health care, working with your doctor as co-pilots or co-authors of your health treatment. But that's just one of the survey's surprises.

For starters, I was surprised that nobody ever did a survey like this before. "Lots of people have been talking about this concept that people are taking greater and greater control of their lives and health," Mr. Schroeder told me in an interview. "We all know anecdotally that this is true, but we weren't able to find any hard research or data about what is driving the empowered patient -- who these people are and why they do what they do and what influence they have. We discovered that this is the first all-out investigation of who the empowered patient is, why they do what they do, and what potential ramifications this will have on health care.  That's why we commissioned it."