by Danny van Leeuwen | Aug 28, 2017
Two stories for you: More than 20 years ago my oldest son was training to do development aid work in the bush of Zimbabwe. As part of his team training, he invited me to come give a talk about health with his team. I was a nurse and a paramedic at the time. I did the...
by Ileana Balcu | Feb 11, 2017
This is a post by SPM Board Member John Hoben – Business Development Director at Bio-Optronics. Hoben’s passion is reconfiguring medical industrial complex assets and transactions from sickness response to true preventive delivery. This entails focusing on...
by Ileana Balcu | Jan 10, 2017
Member Angela Lundberg’s blog article was just published for RheumatoidArthritis.net. It discusses the high out-of-pocket costs of health insurance for people who already have insurance. Health Insurance & RA: Dangerously Uncovered Besides the benefits she...
by Ileana Balcu | Nov 23, 2016
Coming from Romania 15 years ago, Thanksgiving was not a big thing for me. I didn’t quite grasp the holiday. My husband cooked and celebrated, and I helped and observed it in a detached way. 11 years ago, it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I was 22 weeks...
by Ileana Balcu | Sep 29, 2016
Beautiful and comprehensive blog post from Regina Holliday about different types of patient advocates, the evolution of the patient as speaker, consumer, policy-igniter and her own work....
by e-Patient Dave | Aug 8, 2016
We’d love to start a list of other patient-authored papers and posters – let us know in the comments! We know of Dana M. Lewis & Scott Leibrand’s poster about #OpenAPS in June – who else?? We’ve written before about e-patient Sean...
by Ileana Balcu | Aug 1, 2016
This is a guest blog post by Cleo Kordomenos. Cleo was my student in the New Media and Health Communication class I taught at TCNJ. More about the class is shared in this post. Cleo Kordomenos is a Senior Communication Studies student at The College of New Jersey...
by e-Patient Dave | May 23, 2016
A truly significant moment in the history of medicine happened last Wednesday. I say that after attending almost 500 conferences and policy meetings in the past seven years, and I don’t say it lightly. Something many people think is impossible was presented live...
by e-Patient Dave | May 20, 2016
For some reason we haven’t written much about this here – our only post is from SPM Past President Nick Dawson 15 months ago – but this is such a big deal. Here’s an 11 minute introductory video on this – I won’t say more,...
by e-Patient Dave | May 16, 2016
The times, they are a-changin’: medicine is realizing there can be gold found on the internet, amid all the garbage that’s also there. Items: In 2014 a European government started buying Google Ads telling patients “Don’t Google it, check a...
by e-Patient Dave | Apr 4, 2016
SPM member Sara Riggare is a PhD student at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and a member of the BMJ’s Patient Advisory Panel. She has Parkinson Disease, and is highly proactive in dealing with it. One thing some Parkinson patients do is non-contact boxing,...
by e-Patient Dave | Mar 29, 2016
The next in our series of “How I became an e-patient” posts. Tyson Ortiz joined a few months ago, having been introduced to us by fellow Lean practitioner Mark Graban. His story weaves together two concurrent threads: learning about a new aspect of Lean,...
by e-Patient Dave | Jan 18, 2016
Longtime readers of this blog know that for years Susannah Fox was its heart and soul. She was a devoted friend of “Doc Tom” Ferguson, creator of the e-patient concept in the 1990s, and for years at Pew Research she was the dependable guru of Pew’s...
by Ileana Balcu | Dec 2, 2015
Carol Gunn, an SPM physician member, was featured in a Forbes article about her sister’s misdiagnosis, and her mission after her sister’s death. Carol’s tips for patients to avoid being victims of diagnostic mistakes: Tip #1: Get a second opinion...
by David Harlow | Jun 27, 2015
I recently hosted a Google Hangout on Air entitled Patient Reviews of Physicians: The Wisdom of the Crowd? (presented by The Harlow Group LLC in association with The Society for Participatory Medicine). I spoke with Niam Yaraghi (Center for Technology Innovation, The...
by Ileana Balcu | Jun 3, 2015
Ordinarily we limit guest posts to current members of SPM, but this is an extraordinary case. Duncan Cross’s post illustrates so many aspects of how empowered, engaged, activated patients view their lives, and how important it is to have an effective...
by Ileana Balcu | May 11, 2015
This blog welcomes guest posts from SPM members on relevant topics. This is a blog post by Annette McKinnon, an e-patient in Canada. Annette is an enthusiastic advocate for patient inclusion in research and healthcare decision making. She has had rheumatoid...
by e-Patient Dave | Apr 2, 2015
SPM member/legend Regina Holliday, a powerful force for grass roots empowerment and creator of The Walking Gallery of Healthcare, got whooping cough (pertussis) this winter, despite having been vaccinated just a few years earlier. The UK magazine Pharma Times...
by e-Patient Dave | Nov 7, 2014
Susannah Fox, long one of our most popular and prolific bloggers, is roaming to wider audiences these days. She’s entrepreneur-in-residence at Robert Wood Johnson, she has her own site, and she’s just started writing on the hip-hip site Medium.com....
by Ileana Balcu | Sep 10, 2014
Our member Suzanne Mintz, a Family Caregiver Advocate, shares the link to her Narrative Matters article/podcast in the current issue of Health Affairs: The Double Helix: When The System Fails The Intertwined Needs Of Caregiver And Patient...
Collaboration is the Best Medicine: How to Partner with Your Doctor for Better CareOctober 6, 2025
Collaboration is the Best Medicine: Bridging the Gap in Patient ParticipationSeptember 23, 2025
Dealing with Medical Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and FrustrationSeptember 13, 2025
Collaboration is the Best Medicine: The Time for Participatory Medicine is NowSeptember 10, 2025
In Memory of Nancy Finn: e-Patient, Advocate, Author, SPM SupporterJuly 16, 2025
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