Heart Sisters

Emotional intelligence in health care relationships

I’m so pleased to share, with her kind permission, this guest post written by Colette Herrick, originally published on the Six Seconds website. I especially love her example of how a new puppy taught her twin grandchildren a powerful lesson in compassion.

♥

“While medicine continues to advance, receiving health care as a patient is fundamentally a human process.

At the center of effective care delivery is a connection between the health care provider and patient. Yet in the last 25 years, many pressures have eroded the quality of this human-to-human healing connection. The good news is that in spite of all the external and very real pressures on the patient-provider relationship, research reveals something many of us have known: health care providers can learn fairly simple skills that make a large difference. Continue reading →

Tags: Colette Herrick, doctor patient communication, emotional intelligence, empathy, WPLongform

Comments 8 Comments
Categories Health care

When heart patients meet the Black Swan

25 Apr

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

blackswan_johngould I have a little ritual as soon as I board the ferry from my island home for the one hour and 40 minute sailing over to the mainland: I make a stop at the magazine rack of the B.C. Ferries gift shop. It has something to do with both the beautifully tactile feel of a new magazine and its clear association in my brain with almost every ferry ride I’ve ever taken through our west coast Gulf Islands.

That, and a pack of Mentos . . .

During last week’s sailing to Vancouver, we had barely settled into our front row seats in the forward lounge with the Mentos and a copy of Psychology Today in hand before I was riveted by editor Kaja Perina‘s third page commentary. She writes about something called the Black Swan, a reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment. Continue reading →

Tags: black swan, Brooke Lea Foster, Chris Anderson, heart disease diagnosis, Kaja Perina, surviving heart attack

Comments 14 Comments
Categories Living with heart disease, Women and heart attacks

When doctors use words that hurt

21 Apr

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

Consider hearing the scary diagnosis of “heart failure” tripping lightly from your doctor’s lips as if it were no big deal. Can there be anything more terrifying and demoralizing than hearing that your heart is “failing”? And the words don’t even accurately reflect this condition, which actually means that your heart is not pumping blood as well as it should.

So why did doctors come up with this heart failure name, and what on earth were they thinking when they decided it would be a good idea to actually say these words out loud to Real Live Patients? And is there a better piece of medical jargon they could use instead? Continue reading →

Tags: doctor patient communication, Dr. Bernard Lown, heart failure, iatrogenic harm, widow maker heart attack, WPLongform

Comments 21 Comments
Categories Health care, Living with heart disease

Yentl Syndrome: cardiology’s gender gap is alive and well

17 Apr

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

There’s a big fat yawning gap between heart disease diagnostic tests and resulting medical treatments – depending on whether doctors are looking at a male or a female patient lying there on the gurney. I’ve been saying this out loud ever since I came home from Mayo Clinic, where I first learned about the gender gap from Mayo cardiologists following my own heart attack misdiagnosis.

When asked if we might need to develop a new set of diagnostic/treatment protocol guidelines to specifically address this gap, Dr. Sharonne Hayes (founder of the Mayo Women’s Heart Clinic) responded:

“Part of the problem now is that the clinical practice guidelines are less likely to be applied to women compared to men.

“We know that when hospitals have systems in place to ensure they do provide care according to the guidelines, women’s outcomes improve.”

You may be wondering what it will take to put into place systems and guidelines (already used in male patients) for all patients, including women - in order to finally close that gender gap for good. Continue reading →

Tags: Dr. Bernadine Healy, Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, Dr. Sharonne Hayes, gender difference heart disease, gender gap, WPLongform, Yentl Syndrome

Comments 10 Comments
Categories Diagnosing - and misdiagnosing, Women and heart attacks

‘Healthy Privilege’ – when you just can’t imagine being sick

13 Apr

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

Have you had the experience of knowing something intuitively, but without realizing that the thing you know already has a name? For example, have you ever found yourself limping along on the losing end of an argument, yet only much later (when it was far too late!) you suddenly thought of just the perfectly witty retort that you should have come up with?

There’s a name for that. The French call this ‘l’esprit d’escalier’, literally “the spirit of the staircase”. You’re welcome.

Similarly, I’ve been writing for some time about my niggling frustration over something else that I didn’t even realize had an actual name. Continue reading →

Tags: Dr. Ann Becker-Schutte, Dr. Victor Montori, healthy privilege, quantified self, self tracking, Stanford Medicine X, worried well, WPLongform

Comments 25 Comments
Categories Living with heart disease

Patient engagement? How about doctor engagement?

9 Apr

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

It’s a stressful time to be a patient these days, what with expectations running high that we should be both empowered and engaged while self-tracking every trackable health indicator possible – and of course retaining an all-important positive mental attitude – in order to change health care forever.

Whew. I had to go have a wee lie-down just thinking about how big that responsibility may seem on days when we patients are feeling, yes, sick - as an annoyingly significant number of patients living with a chronic and progressive illness tend to feel on any given day. That’s why we’re called “patients”. Continue reading →

Tags: compliance, doctor patient communication, engaged patients, ePatients, non-compliance, patient engagement, WPLongform