Power to the Patient!
A quarter century ago, in the early years of the Web, a seminal book was published by four marketing wizards: The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. Its central point was that the internet was going to completely change marketing, because it made information flow freely, to and between consumers. Importantly, it consisted of 95 theses, patterned explicitly after the 95 theses Martin Luther nailed to the cathedral door in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517.
I’m among the advisory vanguard for NextMed Health, and I’m hoping to speak there too. I hope you’ll come. Register here, or email me for a discount code.
You can’t possibly achieve to your potential if you lack relevant information. In the US you’re legally entitled to all your health data.
Final entry in the series of fourteen foundation truths about Superpatients.
Good health systems will gladly give you whatever information you need to help understand your case. If that’s the case for you, great!
Watch 30 seconds of this – the link starts at 8:47 into the talk. Email subscribers, if you can’t see it, click here.
[Read more…]In 2007 my survival from a near-fatal cancer was aided by information from my patient peers – information that will never warrant getting into a peer reviewed journal. But it was real.
Next in the series of fourteen foundation truths about Superpatients.
Many of the posts in this series have been about the nature of science, both its intellectual basis and the practical realities of how it’s practiced. When you’re at the fringe of medical knowledge, by definition you are messing around in a region where things are not mainstream, and you are hoping to find something that works – something unknown or not well-known. So it’s useful to understand the nature of reality, the nature of science, the nature of medical literature, and how knowledge flows (or doesn’t flow) to the point of need. Here’s a recap of those posts:
[Read more…]Some people act like if there’s no evidence for something, there never will be, so there’s no hope. Nothing could be more unscientific. This is legitimate reason to take action.
Next in the series of fourteen foundation truths about Superpatients.
As medical science progressed from the 1800s to 1900s and beyond, there’s been a long trajectory of teaching young doctors to stick to science, not speculation. I’ve often heard of young doctors in training being scolded with “There’s no evidence for that!”
[Read more…]This truth makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but it’s essential for superpatients to understand.
Next in the series of fourteen foundation truths about Superpatients.
After my cancer my earliest work in learning about medicine was about evidence-based medicine. Not long after, someone told me about the opposite: “eminence-based medicine,” in which people look not to evidence but to whoever is considered the leading authority.
That’s not a joke. It’s profoundly unscientific, but a reality. I’ll give you just two examples, one a century ago and one a few years ago, with the same bottom line: