I’ve often said that we won’t really be making a dent until our conversations show up in the popular culture – outside health and technology circles. Well, I just spotted a great example: yesterday Janet Gallin, host of the San Francisco talk show Love Letters Live, posted a great piece about SPM member Hugo Campos (TEDx), written totally from the point of view of the ordinary consumer. She gets the empowered patient perspective intuitively:

… patients are not permitted access to their own bodily information. Outrageous, really. …

It seems to me that the issue is multi-layered. Who owns the information our bodies produce? Do we? Should we?

Is it safer for a patient to get ongoing information in order take immediate action if there is a crisis present or looming? How about this device as one’s personal diagnostic tool to make good choices in eating and exercise? …

How do the manufacturers benefit from leaving a person out of his own loop and in the dark regarding his own heartbeat? Couldn’t that anxiety lead to the kind of stress that could affect the heart? What if the doctor is out of town?

In a world where we are assured daily that we need to be our own medical advocates, what could justify withholding information from a defibrillator?…

Watch for more stories like this to show up in mainstream media – that’s a sign we’re reaching the people we need to reach. I think of it as “the people in my supermarket.” When they start thinking differently, asking new things, and acting differently, then we’ll be making progress that shows up on the street.
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Newcomers to this ongoing subject are invited to first watch Hugo’s TEDx talk, linked above, and then review our previous coverage of him here, including his appearances on NPR and in several newspapers. Honestly, though, nobody’s summarized it as freshly, sensibly and briefly as Gallin does here.