Category: Health care

What heart patients want ICD makers to know

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 48 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

dont-forget-about-me-4225379_1280 One of my Mayo Clinic heart sisters was recently invited to speak at a Patient Advocates Forum during the annual AdvaMed conference in Washington, DC – billed as “the premiere annual conference of the medical technology industry”.  This industry includes companies that manufacture cardiac devices like pacemakers and ICDs (Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators).

So she did what all of us lucky ‘Mayo grads’ are easily able to do: she contacted other graduates of the annual WomenHeart Science and Leadership Symposium for Women With Heart Disease at Mayo Clinic. What, she asked us, would patients want her to say to these 1,000+ delegates from device companies (and the physicians who care for heart patients) attending this conference? She wanted other patient perspectives on what it’s like living with a metal device implanted inside your chest, what they worried about, and what could be done better. Here is a sampling of the responses – so listen up, titans of the medical device industry and all those who implant these devices into our bodies:   Continue reading “What heart patients want ICD makers to know” →

Medical jargon: do you need a translator?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 22 Comments

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by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

I just love this. Which is to say I don’t love it at all – you need to imagine the snark in my voice if I were actually saying that out loud to you. What I don’t love at all is this example of a real life physician (a cardiac surgeon in Indiana) who is answering a patient’s online question on the website called HealthTap (a site that appears at first blush to be about medical Q&A, but is actually more like a matchmaking service between doctor-shopping patients and the doctors who want to woo them).  Continue reading “Medical jargon: do you need a translator?” →

Unconscious bias: why women don’t get the same care men do

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 34 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥  @HeartSisters

To the surprise of absolutely no women who have ever been misdiagnosed in mid-heart attack as I was, Dr. Mary O’Connor, claims:

“Women do not always receive the same medical care as men.”

Continue reading “Unconscious bias: why women don’t get the same care men do” →

News flash: care improves when doctors consider the whole person

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 11 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

When I worked in hospice palliative care, I remember being gobsmacked one day while reading in a medical journal about Dr. Harvey Chochinov’s research on Dignity Therapy out of the Manitoba Palliative Care Research Unit.(1) His studies determined that – wait for it! – patients feel better when their doctors listen to them. This of course sounds like a no-brainer until it hits you upside the head that, apparently, not all doctors know this fact to be true unless it’s published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Is it actually possible, I wondered at the time, that doctors thumbing through journals madly take notes when they discover a surprisingly shocking news flash like this?

Recently, I ran across yet another fine example of the bleedin’ obvious that makes me crazy-go-nuts, as my Ukrainian relatives would say. Continue reading “News flash: care improves when doctors consider the whole person” →