Search all of the Society for Participatory Medicine website:Search

Christine Bienvenu

I started becoming an ePatient in 2008 when we were looking for a diagnosis for my eldest son (Aspergers Syndrome) and when I was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 35 in 2010. I naturally empowered myself to better understand and deal my new health reality. Researching my illness online I realised that French-speaking Switzerland had no breast cancer community and so through Facebook and Twitter I created Seinplement Romand(e)s, the breast cancer community I would have liked to find when I was diagnosed. Becoming an ePatient and then spreading awareness about it was not and is not an easy feat in paternalistic conservative Switzerland.

Through Twitter then Facebook I was able to meet ePatient Dave after reading his book Let Patients Help! which was a revelation to me because I could finally put words on the experiences I was living. I felt the French community needed to have access to Dave’s message of empowerment and patient-healthcare professional collaboration, so that patients here could start taking back their rightful place in the medical partnership. Today, my empowerment and patient community experience and knowledge has given me the authority to become a professional ePatient at the Lausanne and Geneva University Hospitals and to give classes and training to healthcare professionals throughout French-speaking Switzerland. Although things have moved forward in the years since I’ve started my ePatient journey, we are still very few patients who have been able to break away from the unbalanced relationship patients have with their healthcare professionals: there is still much awareness and education to be done. It is therefore important for me to be part of the Society For Participatory Medicine so that I have other empowered patients to soundboard with and not feel alone in my endeavors here. S4PM enables me to learn from peer patients and have the confidence in myself to go against the conservative cultural tide.