I’m thrilled to say that the BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal, has just released a new article I wrote about the “social movement” aspect of our work, including the rationale for listening to the patient perspective.
Intended for medical audiences around the world, it’s part of a big, 21-article multimedia “Spotlight” supplement that will be in Thursday’s print edition; it was all released online yesterday. Over on the e-patient blog I posted the full list of articles, including the names of other members of our Society for Participatory Medicine who are in this issue. Big participation, big visibility!
This supplement, appearing in one of the world’s top medical journals, may well be the biggest moment yet in the history of our movement. It’s got hours of reading and listening, with contributions from eight countries, if I counted correctly.
Those of you in my generation – the era of many social movements – will relate to the parallels with what’s happening today: a whole class of people whose voice has been considered “not worthy” is speaking up, demonstrating capability, and pushing back when we’re told to “stay in our place.” :-)
Is it time for a new scientific field?
Near the end of the article I cite Thomas Kuhn’s classic 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I first mentioned publicly at the end of this four minute interview last fall, about my appointment as next month’s Visiting Professor at Mayo. (Email subscribers, if you can’t see the video, click here.)
I’ll be saying a lot more about Kuhn in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.
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