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Building for Success: How Good Clinicians Can Empower Patients

Building for Success: How Good Clinicians Can Empower Patients

Editor’s note: Ibrahim Rashid contracted Long COVID more than two years ago. The experience is propelling his patient advocacy and entrepreneurship, as co-founder of the digital health company Strong Haulers. In this excerpt from his new book, Strong Hauler: Learning...
The Power of the Prescription Pad

The Power of the Prescription Pad

At some point in our lives, we’ll be handed a little sheet of paper from our physician that has scribbled on it the medication we need, how much of it, and how often we should take it. These little slips of paper are power. They tell us that in order to get better, we...
A Reminder of How To Care Through Self-Reflection

A Reminder of How To Care Through Self-Reflection

After 28 years of  nursing I could potentially consider myself an expert in the field. But this perception couldn’t be further from the truth. I still come home from a shift and often wonder and hope that I brought comfort to at least one patient. Did I do enough?...

AI Gives SPM a New Opportunity to Lead

I recently posted an article entitled, “In Cancer, Patient-Empowering AI Begins to Change Care, Relationships,” that contained this declaration, “Good medicine needs to become participatory medicine, not least because involving the patient as a partner consistently...
Why Dying is Not Giving Up

Why Dying is Not Giving Up

Throughout my time as a psychotherapist specializing in end of life diseases, primarily cancer, I have spent many hours talking with both patients and medical teams about the importance of authentic communication and end of life planning. I see this kind of planning...
Patients and Industry: Starting Our New Life Together in 2023

Patients and Industry: Starting Our New Life Together in 2023

Flash back to my article for the Society for Participatory Medicine last year: Let’s Save the Date and Make Patient Engagement Official in 2022. I’m here to deliver some great news: we tied the knot! By the power vested in clinical research, the FDA now pronounces us...
How All of Us in Healthcare Can Close the Empathy Gap

How All of Us in Healthcare Can Close the Empathy Gap

I recently saw The Color of Care, a documentary highlighting the disparate and inequitable care received by Black and Brown individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the movie, Executive Producer Oprah Winfrey opined that one of the primary issues with...
Building Us Up, Not Tearing Us Down

Building Us Up, Not Tearing Us Down

“Lack of effort and persistence”  Those words cut like a knife, leaving a deeper wound than any facet of illness my daughter has faced. A provider used those words to describe my 19-year-old daughter Sara, who has lived her entire life with chronic complex medical...
Dr. Danny Sands: Participatory Medicine Can Cure Many Ills

Dr. Danny Sands: Participatory Medicine Can Cure Many Ills

Embracing shared decision making in medicine will improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, increase health equity, and even help alleviate clinician burnout, Danny Sands, MD, co-founder of the Society for Participatory Medicine, said in a recent podcast interview. Erin...
Patients and the Diagnostic Journey: Finding Specialists

Patients and the Diagnostic Journey: Finding Specialists

The journey to diagnosis for patients, particularly those living with complex health conditions remains challenging for patients, their loved ones, and their physicians. As frontline experts on the diseases and conditions affecting their lives, patients and family...
Simple Measures to Put Caring Back in Health Care

Simple Measures to Put Caring Back in Health Care

Editor’s note: When oncology and hospice nurse Theresa Brown was diagnosed with breast cancer, she couldn’t believe how disorganized and unempathic her care was. Ultimately she called it D.I.Y. care, as in Do-It-Yourself: figure out the treatment process, find the...
Improving Cancer Care for BIPOC Women is Everyone’s Cause

Improving Cancer Care for BIPOC Women is Everyone’s Cause

For women of color facing breast cancer diagnoses, making decisions is a precarious balancing act, a process with significant implications across healthcare and society. Diagnosis tends to occur at a younger age (that is, before 40, when many screening programs become...
How Reception Areas can Open Doors to Better Health

How Reception Areas can Open Doors to Better Health

Editor’s note: Moyez Jiwa, MD, founder of The Journal of Health Design, and The Health Design Podcast, believes that we can improve outcomes for patients as soon as  today by simply paying attention to the small details that needlessly undermine those outcomes. In...

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