e-Patient Dave

Democratizing Healthcare

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Writings and upcoming events – July 2015

Like last month, here’s this month’s update on travels, events, and articles (including a first for me!).

In my travels if you’re in the area and want to connect, contact me.

Writings:

  • Do you use online symptom checkers? Go for it but be wise: Last Friday I was interviewed by the Boston Globe (see below) to comment on a new BMJ article. It was such a stimulating topic I wrote a much-mentioned post about it on e-patients.net, and I hope to be writing more

Media mentions:
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Friday: It’s #RebelJam15! Much to learn – and FREE! (Speaker Academy #24)

RebelJampot

This is an important, free opportunity for all those who want to change the world to learn from people who have experience.

This is the latest in the Speaker Academy series, which started here. 

I first encountered the “corporate rebel” movement in Saskatchewan two years ago. It was an unexpected, unscheduled pre-conference by Helen Bevan of the UK’s National Health Service – a dry run of a half day workshop she presented a week later in London. Her thoughts were so fresh, relevant, and potent that I almost fell off my chair. I mean, look what I tweeted, mid-session:
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Upcoming events & media – June 2015 edition

Clip art of newspaper boy
Public domain

This spring I had a couple of cases where people said “I wish I’d known you were coming – we could have had coffee!” (That’s always compelling to me…) So I’m going to try publishing a monthly update (more or less) of upcoming travels, newly added future events, and maybe a few other things. Short & sweet. Thank you to Casey Quinlan, a focused production machine if I ever saw one, for making this happen!

Underway now:

  • June 7-13, Lucerne, Switzerland: IKF’s annual Swiss tour. Multiple keynotes and private meetings.

Upcoming travels & webcasts

Recently added events (stay tuned for details!)

  • Early September: Europe (to be announced)
  • Mid September: 10 day tour of Alaska! These people are getting it bigtime and spreading the word!
  • September 23-24: Medicine-X | Ed Bringing e-patient thinking to the medical education curriculum!
  • November 4, DC: American Psychological Association Presidential Innovation Summit
  • November 11, Sacramento: Transforming Healthcare Summit

My first-ever article in a clinical practice journal where I’m listed as First Author(!)

  • “Open Visit Notes: A Patient’s Perspective and Expanding National Experience,” in ASCO’s Journal of Oncology Practice. It’s open access (free), to allow reading and sharing by patients.
    • Full text, or PDF of the print pages; article extract page here.
    • Thank you to Beth Israel Deaconess OpenNotes team, and to the journal for making it open access.

Recent media mentions:

 

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Mayo’s “Healing Words” program – reading from “Facing Death – With Hope”

A month ago I posted about my trip to the Mayo Clinic as Visiting Professor, and noted that the morning before my Grand Rounds lecture, I went into a video studio and recorded a reading about facing death, from my first book, Laugh, Sing, and Eat Like a Pig. (The title is explained in the video.) Here’s the video. (Email subscribers, if you can’t see the video, click the post headline above to come online.)

As I noted in the previous post, this was recorded for Mayo’s “Healing Words” program for their in-patient TV channel, produced by Mayo’s Dolores Jean Lavins Center for Humanities in Medicine (@MayoHumanities on Twitter and on Facebook). The first 25 minutes are discussion with host Jacque Fletcher about the book and about my experience of facing death. Then there’s an 8 minute reading – the section that later became my tiny second book, Facing Death – With Hope, then Jacque closes the program, talking about the therapeutic value of patients blogging.

As always, looking at it afterward, it doesn’t look polished enough – but it was done in one take, with no rehearsal, no mirror to see if my hair was okay:-), and – for those who’ve been following my fitness saga on Facebook – it’s pretty obvious that my clothes had become too big! (The shoulders on the suit are an inch down the arm, you can see air between the shirt collar and the neck… oh well!)

But it was real, and I hope it will be of value to future viewers. I’m pretty sure that those of you who lived through those months in 2007 with me will be reminded of what that time was like. Words will never express the value of your support back then – but they don’t need to, because we know it was real.

Thank you to the Humanities department for this production, and thank you especially for granting permission to present it outside of Mayo.

 

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First post from Mayo: “Radical Acceptance” on Healing Words, and singers Kim & Reggie

Healing Words studio shot 2015-03-25Last week, Monday night through Wednesday, was my long-awaited visit to the Mayo Clinic, invited by their Chief Residents in Internal Medicine: Dr. Chris Aakre, Dr. Luke Seaburg, Dr. Luke Hafdahl, and Dr. Kimberly Carter. It was a wholly different event than most, because although it included some speaking, the whole feeling of the event was for us to learn from each other over the course of those ~48 hours.

In the next day or two I’ll post the video of my Grand Rounds lecture, which was on the “new science of patient engagement” idea I recently proposed here. But first I want to talk about two connections with the Center for Humanities in Medicine. (Does your hospital have one of those? Mayo’s is on Twitter at @MayoHumanities and on Facebook.)

Facing Death

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Proposing a new *science* of patient engagement

In three weeks at the Mayo Clinic, as their invited Visiting Professor in Internal Medicine, I’ll be delivering the most fascinating talk of my career. I’ll be formally starting the process of examining whether we must all agree that there’s a hole in the dominant paradigm of how medicine works, and whether we must solve this together by creating a new, scientific approach to patient engagement.

To start, please watch the four minute video below. For convenience, and to make it more searchable, at bottom of this post is a transcript.
Cover of Structure of Scientific Revolutions 50th anniversary edition

To do this I’ll be using the 1962 book that brought the word “paradigm” into popular use: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn. His definition of paradigm was much more strict and rigorous than the trendy loose word we throw around today; he studied numerous scientific revolutions (Newton, Copernicus, etc) and identified a regular, repeated structure to the process by which a scientific field takes form and then, sometimes, realizes a revolution is needed.

The process is both scientific and sociological – a fact that annoyed the crap out of scientists who believed that they are solely logical. From Wikipedia:
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