e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
White Paper Introduction: “Tech is changing how we think about ourselves” #DocTom10
Next in our #DocTom10 series, which started here. If you haven't read about Tom's preface, and the Foreword by Pew Research, we urge you to. Remember, this was all written a decade ago. Today, Tom's introduction. Please discuss! The key question we must ask is...
“Extremis”: new Netflix documentary on end of life with Dr. Jessica Zitter
We've often written here about palliative care and end of life. (The two are not the same: you can have palliative care without having decided the end is near.) They're, in a sense, the ultimate expression of patient-centered care, forcing the question: who gets...
#DocTom10: Foreword by Pew Research – astounding statistics from Y2K
Next in our #DocTom10 series, which started here. Today we resume our review of the chapters of Tom's White Paper. This Foreword stands on its own, with no comment needed, so we'll just paste it in verbatim. Note: these numbers are from 2000, when the Web was just six...
Susannah Fox: Tom’s legacy #DocTom10
Next in our #DocTom10 series, which started here. This is a blessing - the first post here in two years by Susannah Fox. More about this at the end of the post - for now, let's get to the good stuff. She originally posted this as a comment on Friday's post by John...
Warmly Remembering Tom Ferguson & His Legacy #DocTom10
Next in our #DocTom10 series, which started here. I first met Tom Ferguson in 1994 online (where else?) when he reached out via email to chat about online support groups. I was still in graduate school at the time, and he had come across my indexes of Internet...
Remembering Tom’s death 10 years ago today: #DocTom10, post 4
Next in our #DocTom10 series, which started here. Ten years ago today, Tom Ferguson died unexpectedly. He was in the hospital at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), being treated for multiple myeloma. Tom's work back then was captured on his...
#DocTom10, post 3: The preface and the paradigm
Third in our #DocTom10 series, which started here. Yesterday I asked that you download Ferguson's white paper, the manifesto he was working on when he died unexpectedly, ten years ago tomorrow. Today we'll look at the preface. The lost section: questioning the...
#DocTom10, post 2: Please download the White Paper / Libro Blanco
Yesterday, in Honoring the memory of “Doc Tom” Ferguson, ten years after his death, we started a series of posts to mark his untimely demise and look back on his work. As we noted, at his death he was working on a project funded by Robert Wood Johnson's Pioneer...
Honoring the memory of “Doc Tom” Ferguson, ten years after his death
"Doc Tom" Ferguson, the source of our Society for Participatory Medicine, died unexpectedly ten years ago this week, April 14, 2006. In the coming days we'll run a series of posts remembering his work and vision. Especially, we're going to walk through the seminal...
Sara Riggare: “The new kind of patients challenge healthcare”
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, e.g. the...
National Doctors’ Day, clinicians, hacking open access, and remembering an e-patient
Somehow I'd never heard of National Doctors' Day, but apparently it started 25 years ago, in 1991. As one of many SPM members whose life was saved (or is being helped) by excellent physicians, I'm in! And I want to shine a broader spotlight on the wider class called...
How I became an e-patient: through practice, with coaching (using Lean on the patient side)
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, and the...
