Power to the Patient!
Speaking isn’t just a business – it’s a vehicle for accomplishing what we really need: changing how people think … especially, empowering them to take effective action, to become involved in their health. Here’s a photo from a speech to radiologists, encouraging them to share images with patients:
The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) continues to lead the world in patient & public partnership with clinicians, including more coverage of patient empowerment topics than anyone else I know in medical publishing. Some of the issues are unique to Britain but many are global cultural issues – not least being the balance of power between clinicians and the patients they serve.
[Read more…]Today in an email thread I realized it’s a decade since the OpenNotes work started, via Tom Delbanco and Jan Walker, and now promoted so brilliantly by Liz Salmi. How great that back then my PCP Danny Sands and I were among the first crew of OpenNotes study participants!
I decided to mark the occasion by creating an /OpenNotes page on my site, listing all the blog posts and articles that have emerged as part of the work.
(Interesting to observe: before cancer rearranged my life, I don’t think I ever stuck with any cause for ten years straight. Funny how that happens.)
This is such big news that last weekend I made over my home page with this at the top:
It’s the banner from the cover of my new book Superpatients: Patients who extend science when medicine’s out of answers.
[Read more…]Perhaps others would find it useful… either your exact tool or your general method! In any case, share it with us, and maybe you’ll get brought to Amsterdam for …
Sunday night I blogged this:
I haven’t been blogging nearly as much as I did five years ago, largely because my early blogging was all about trying to figure out “what the heck is up with the American healthcare system???” … it’s been two years since I had any new realizations.
Why would “figuring it out” make me stop blogging? Because as a change activist who’s also a public speaker, I’m gripped by one question: “What could be said that would make any difference?” There literally is no point in saying anything else. So once I realized how locked-in the system is, how intractable it is to change, I lost interest in flapping my gums and fingers.
But new things are in the wind, and it’s time to start pushing out those top learnings as foundation for what’s next. So, game on – in responses to two tweets, I got ornery:
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