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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...
Expert Advisory Boards: A New Model for Co-Exploration

Expert Advisory Boards: A New Model for Co-Exploration

A few years ago I learned that non-profit organizations MUST have a Scientific or Medical Advisory Board in order to be listed on NIH’s website as an informational resource for patients. Likewise, many foundation grants require a non-profit to have a similar...
Health Literacy Requires Talking with People – Not Patients

Health Literacy Requires Talking with People – Not Patients

“When someone is having an acute situation, that is not a teaching moment.” Peter Pitts  I recently participated on a panel at the STAT Summit with two brilliant healthcare thought leaders, former FDA Associate Commissioner and current president of the Center for...
A Citizen’s Response Corps for Digital Health

A Citizen’s Response Corps for Digital Health

Editor’s note: In his new book, The Long Haul – Solving the Puzzle of the Pandemic’s Long Haulers and How They Are Changing Healthcare Forever, journalist and patient Ryan Prior depicts the courage of patients with Long COVID who were the first to name,...
Storytelling: Where Compassion is Born

Storytelling: Where Compassion is Born

Editor’s note: In this excerpt from her latest book, Ducks in a Row, Canadian-based author, Sue Robins explains the power of storytelling for everybody invested in health care—patients and clinicians alike.  A well-told story, Robins explains, has the ability to...
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...
The Keys to Good Relationships With Your Care Teams

The Keys to Good Relationships With Your Care Teams

Being born with cystic fibrosis, a progressive, genetic lung disease, I have had countless health encounters throughout my life. Through these experiences I have learned the power that lies in self advocating for my health in the clinic setting with my doctors and...
Participatory Medicine is Where You Find It

Participatory Medicine is Where You Find It

Collaborations across healthcare can save lives – especially when working with patient advocates. For a person like me, who is impacted by a rare, neurological, and incurable disease, it’s my mission to ensure that patients’ perspectives are represented  early...
Turning Pain into Power through Advocacy

Turning Pain into Power through Advocacy

When I heard the words, “You have Lupus,” I didn’t know the magnitude of how much my life was going to be tested. It started in 1980 when rashes and unexplained fevers plagued my life. Seeing doctors about my symptoms led to solutions that were only temporary. Fifteen...
Creating Your Own Self-Advocacy Style

Creating Your Own Self-Advocacy Style

We cannot always choose what happens to us in life, but we can choose how we respond and handle it. Take for example, the time that I had a physical examination with my relatively new primary care physician. They did blood work and I received a report, along with a...
Tell Me Your Story: How Narrative Medicine Fosters Trust

Tell Me Your Story: How Narrative Medicine Fosters Trust

Curled up on her hospital gurney but unable to sleep, the middle-aged Latinx female trauma patient sighed, “I am tired of being tired.” Before daybreak, “Rosa” (not her real name) had arrived at work to open her New York restaurant but was interrupted by an intruder...
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...

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