In February 2003, one of the site founders contracted RHS. In trying to find out more about the condition on the Internet it was found that information was not only scarce, but advice was often misguided and misdiagnosis was common.

A web site was created and updated with daily RHS diary entries so that people could watch a so-called 'rare disease' unfold and see how it affected the patient. The aim was to give other sufferers a 'preview' of what might lay ahead.

Within weeks another RHS sufferer, who found the diary helpful, wanted to submit their own journal and shortly after that another offer came.

Emails landed from all over the world so a forum was created to allow people to discuss their conditions and the RamsayHunt.Org community was born.

Other parts of the site were developed to include information about the condition and within months it topped the main search engines.

As more members joined, it became apparent that other illnesses were to blame for their facial paralysis. Additional sub forums were created to accommodate their discussions so the RHS forum evolved into a community for all facial paralysis sufferers.

To make the non-RHS sufferers feel less like 'outsiders' a new domain name was required. In June 2004 www.FacialParalysis.Net was purchased and configured so that members could also access the RHS support forums via the new address. Although people were essentially using the same site as before, the FPN now had it's own colour scheme and design so it looked and operated like a separate website.

Moderators were soon required such was the demand for support and now we are proud to say that we can provide 24 hour multi-lingual support as our Mods are based in the UK, USA, Mexico and Australia.

From 2007 the forum became the target of spammers and this caused a huge rise in demand for web server resources. Despite great efforts and constant battles with an uncooperative hosting company nothing could be done to stabilise the forums and long outages were seen.

In February 2009 the sites were migrated to a new server and upgraded to the latest software version. During the updates the FPN was split off to become a dedicated site for facial paralysis sufferers.

The new RHS site means that members can create live Blogs to keep their friends, family and of course, our visitors up to date with their progress. The support forums have been integrated into the site so that logging in to the site will automatically provide access to the forums. Other advanced features are also available to members.

For the moment, there is limited content but the developers and researchers are working on content which will be made available in the near future.