e-Patient Dave

Democratizing Healthcare

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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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Health 1.0, 2.0, 3.0: today’s flow of information has changed what’s possible

This 51 second animation accompanies my article last week in the BMJ, “From Patient Centred to People Powered: Autonomy on the Rise.” The video expresses, concisely, a slide that for years I’ve presented in 3-5 minutes. It’s an idea first published back in 2010 by Lucien Engelen, during the same time period when he was preparing for the TEDx Maastricht event in April 2011 where I spoke. It shows how the flow of valuable information has changed, which makes new things possible, as in all other parts of life.

From the BMJ article: [Read more…]

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“Balancing Diabetes” by @SixUntilMe

Balancing Diabetes cover

Kerri website photo
Kerri’s photo on her blog

I’m going to do something really rare: I’m going to endorse a book I’ve barely started reading. It’s Balancing Diabetes: Conversations about finding happiness and living well, by the famous diabetes blogger Kerri Sparling, aka @SixUntilMe. (She was six until she was diagnosed and became the “me” she is today.)

This endorsement is rare because I’ve always said I can’t endorse something I haven’t consumed. (Did you know that most book blurbs are written by people who haven’t read the book?) But this situation is out of the ordinary:

  • Last week at the SuperPatients event in Providence, I witnessed what a powerful speaker Kerri is. She owned that room for her 20 minutes – like a good TED Talk. And she wasn’t just a capable speaker – she created the world of living with diabetes. As much as I’d heard about diabetes through the years, I had never gotten the world of living with it. To create that in minutes takes extraordinary skill.
  • She signed my copy of her book, and last weekend I started reading it. Bingo, in the first pages it was clear that this is the same voice. (I should have known, because her blog is just as direct and powerful, but so often books come out different. This one works.)

So I’m endorsing. Buy it if you want to understand life with diabetes, or if you want a great read about how different a patient’s point of view is, compared to what we read about the disease per se.

I also love that Kerri has woven this disease into her life, and though she doesn’t love the disease, she loves her life. That’s important, because the book is about balancing, about having a life you love.

See, that’s patient centered care: looking at care from the patient’s perspective, separate from what the lab tests say.

p.s. I first learned of Kerri years ago when she blogged about her pregnancy. Why’s that remarkable? Because when she was diagnosed as a child she was told she shouldn’t have children. Well, as fans of her Facebook page know, today she has one of the most remarkable, amazing four year olds in the world. The child’s nickname is Birdie… check the cover.

 

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“Activate your super-patient powers”: Public event (free!) at Brown next Monday

Superpatient flyer screen capture
Click to view & download the PDF (459k)

For years I’ve been saying that this movement won’t really be creating change until it gets out of the conference world and reaches Main Street. (Often I say we won’t really be getting there until the people you meet at the grocery story know what we’re talking about.)

So you can imagine how thrilled I am that Brown University in Providence, R.I. is supporting a first-of-its-kind grass roots event next Monday night, attached to a session I’m teaching the next day for one of their courses.

We’re playing with the idea of tying this to “how superheros got their superpowers” – the so-called “origin story,” like Peter Parker and his radioactive spider – to help people see that they may be capable of more than they realized. And in that context, we realized we have three different types of “superpatients”, who will present:

  • Acute care, like my kidney cancer – it came up suddenly (and now it’s over)
  • Chronic care – people who manage a chronic condition, like famous diabetes blogger Kerri Sparling (@SixUntilMe)
  • Crisis care – patients or caregivers who step up in a crisis and do everything they can to help, exemplified here by Pat Mastors (@PMastors).

These cases are all very different but they have a common thread: when patients get activated they can make a huge difference.
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This event all came together very quickly, so I apologize for the last minute nature of this notice. If you can come, that’ll be great. In any case, feel free to download this PDF or just send people this link.

If this gets great reviews, I hope to do more. If it doesn’t, we’ll fix it. Because from now on it’s “game on” – let the change take root!
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The course where I’m speaking is Brown’s Executive Master in Healthcare Leadership program – a year-long course for mid-career executives. Tuesday is their final session of the course. Thank you to Angela Sherwin and Judith Bentkover for their vision, and to Brown’s program for helping make this happen!