Toward a New Science of Patient Engagement
Tomorrow (Thursday Feb 21) at 2pm ET, for the second time I’ll be presenting the concept for my new book, Superpatients: Patients who extend science when all other options are gone. The first time was December, in a private webinar for the QI [quality improvement] Connect team in Scotland. Registration is open to the public here but that’s optional – at bottom I’ll paste in how you can join it at showtime, without registration. In any case it’s free and no obligation.
For the past year I’ve mentioned this in speeches, but I’ve never written about it here:
In November 2014, a routine blood test revealed that my hemoglobin A1C was slightly elevated, making me what they call “pre-diabetic.” (See lab results below.)
Well, that got my attention.
Why? Because, through social media, I know a lot of really smart, articulate, passionate members of “the DOC” – the diabetes online
community – and I’ve learned all kinds of things about the reality of diabetes that you don’t see in the TV commercials.
I’ve learned that it’s not rare for a basically “healthy” person with diabetes (PWD) to die in their sleep when their blood sugar crashes; I’ve learned about unfixable nerve pain and amputations; I’ve learned about all kinds of things that can go wrong when diabetes gets out of control. I don’t even know enough to make a properly prioritized list, but I know enough to say you do not want to have diabetes if you can avoid it.
(Footnote: it drives many of us nuts when a TV commercial or news story talks about “diabetes” as if it were one thing. It’s not. Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is medically different from type 2 diabetes (T2D), which I am at risk for; it typically arises in middle age, but has been seen as young as age 3. “Diabetes prevention” is an ignorant thing to say: Type 1 can’t be prevented, Type 2 sometimes can. But that’s a rant for another day.)