Category: Health care

It’s not what you do. It’s who you are.

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 3 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥   @HeartSisters

In 2015, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about virtues in his column called “The Moral Bucket List”.  But he was actually writing about two different sets of virtues: our résumé virtues and our eulogy virtues.

The résumé virtues are what you do: the workplace skills you’d talk about when job-hunting.  The eulogy virtues are who you are:  what people will say about you at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, generous, funny, honest, trustworthy, etc. Both types of virtues are important and worth pursuing, but as David reminds us, only eulogy virtues have lasting value and legacy.  But depending on who’s doing the asking, it seems those résumé virtues appear to be far more important to certain people.    . Continue reading “It’s not what you do. It’s who you are.” →

#PatientsIncluded “Lite”: sort of, maybe, but not really

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 8 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

It’s fashionable these days for medical conference organizers, journal editors and researchers to boast about how “patient-focused” they are whenever they seek perspectives shared by patients with lived experience. But does boasting make it so?

Some of this patient focus has seemed a bit tepid to me. It’s as if they’re saying they want the patient voice – sort of, maybe, but not really. Here’s what I mean by that:  Continue reading “#PatientsIncluded “Lite”: sort of, maybe, but not really” →

Feynman’s Razor: “Explain it like you’re talking to an imaginary child”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 17 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥   @HeartSisters

https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/no-other-love-heart-wrenching-letters-from-richard-feynman-to-his-late-wife-arline

 

How health journalists help “to make people who feel invisible feel seen”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 12 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

I was late in discovering the writing of Ed Yong. The British-American journalist had already been a staff writer at The Atlantic for six years before I first read one of his articles, but it was his rare ability to make the most complex science make sense which convinced me to start reading everything he wrote. Here’s how Ed’s own editors described his series of articles on the COVID pandemic which won him the  Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2021:  “Ed Yong anticipated the course of the coronavirus pandemic, clarified its dangers, and illuminated the government’s disastrous failure to curb it.”

One of the early issues that Ed Yong zeroed in on was that physicians seemed  remarkably dismissive of people who were suffering terribly with what’s now called Long-COVID. But Ed and a small spattering of other science writers were taking those patient reports seriously. And in his regular newsletter, Ed described the important role of journalism as helping “to make people who feel invisible feel seen”. 

Continue reading “How health journalists help “to make people who feel invisible feel seen”” →