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 

What if hospital staff could read our minds?

5 Apr

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Thank you, Cleveland Clinic, for producing this moving 4 1/2 minute little film, Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care

When routine tasks trigger heart symptoms

1 Apr

by Carolyn Thomas  @HeartSisters

household-choresHeart disease is a strange animal indeed. Our very first symptoms can range from mild shortness of breath on exertion to sudden death – and almost every possible symptom in between.  My own were those of the textbook Hollywood Heart Attack (crushing central chest pain, nausea, sweating, and pain down my left arm) – yet I was sent home by Emergency Department staff with a misdiagnosis of indigestion – feeling very, very embarrassed for having made such a fuss over nothing.  It took two weeks to be finally correctly diagnosed with myocardial infarction (heart attack) caused by a 99% blockage of my Left Anterior Descending Coronary artery. And it took several more months - and another trip back to hospital - to figure out what was causing ongoing distressing symptoms that were ultimately diagnosed as Inoperable Coronary Microvascular Disease (MVD) or dysfunction of the smaller coronary arteries.

But MVD is very tricky to diagnose because most standard coronary artery disease diagnostic tests - the kind that work so well at  identifying big fat blockages in our larger arteries – may not be capable of catching it.  Continue reading 

What your cardiologist (should have) learned last month

28 Mar

by Carolyn Thomas  @HeartSisters

After a bunch of top cardiologists got together in San Francisco recently for the annual American College of Cardiology scientific meetings, Debra Sherman and her team did a fine job summing up highlights for Reuters.*  One of their first take-home messages: some cardiologists believe that drug prescribing has gotten out of hand.  Continue reading 

Stressed: who, me?

24 Mar

by Carolyn Thomas  @HeartSisters

Are you feeling particularly stressed these days?  Chances are your answer to this question might be highly influenced by both your age and your gender (not to mention what the heck is also going on in your day-to-day life). 

A national survey on how daily stress affects our personal health issues, for example, found that respondents’ answers appeared divided according to these four main age groups:   Continue reading 

Just not listening – or “narrative incompetence”?

22 Mar

by Carolyn Thomas  @HeartSisters

The Radical EarI’ve been reading lately about something called the patient’s narrative in medicine. Although it’s basically defined as patients telling the story of what originally brought them to see the doctor, it’s actually much more.

Doctors, for example, all too often may see “the story” as an unnecessarily lengthy distraction from getting swiftly to diagnosis and treatment.

But as U.K. physician Dr. Jeff Clark describes it, connecting with and understanding the patient requires a doctor to appreciate each person’s unique perspective. In the December 2008 issue of The British Journal of General Practice, he asked other doctors to consider how not listening to a patient’s story can be compared to his colleague’s golf game:  Continue reading 

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