Tag: canadian cardiovascular congress

A crown, a crowd and a standing ovation

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 12 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ❤️   Heart Sisters (on Blue Sky)

Last week, I watched a heart patient from Winnipeg named Jackie Ratz* get a standing ovation at a cardiology conference.

I wasn’t at the 2-day Canadian Women’s Heart Health Summit in person, but I participated via Zoom (in my jammies, watching Jackie onstage in Ottawa over my second cup of coffee here on the beautiful west coast of Canada).  I can tell you that the impressive audience response to Jackie’s presentation rarely – if ever – would have happened to patients a decade or so ago (mostly because few patients then were invited to speak onstage to an audience of physicians). With her kind permission, I’m sharing Jackie’s script from her Canadian Women’s Heart Health Summit presentation called “I WEAR A CROWN” (and a 2024 video of this presentation at the end of this post).

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Patient bloggers at healthcare conferences: ‘real’ journalists?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 9 Comments
Like some of my most deliciously niggling inspirations these days, this one started on Twitter. Arthritis patient advocate, speaker and a Stanford University Medicine X e-Patient Scholar Britt Johnson tweeted this:
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To which patient advocate, speaker (and also a Stanford University Medicine X e-Patient Scholar Carly Medosch who blogs at Chronic Carly) responded:
 
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It was Carly’s observation that caused one of my eyebrows to flick skyward, unbidden.

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The symptomatic tipping point during heart attack

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 14 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

I’ve been fascinated by studies on why women wait so long to get medical help despite heart attack symptoms ever since the spring of 2008 when I spent way too long before seeking help for my own increasingly debilitating signs.  I sometimes replay that two-week experience in my little peabrain, and I ask myself the same question being asked by a team of Harvard researchers in a new study:

“Why do women wait longer than men before seeking help even when they’re in the middle of a frickety-frackin’ heart attack?”

Continue reading “The symptomatic tipping point during heart attack” →

How gender bias threatens women’s health

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 21 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

I attended the 64th annual Canadian Cardiovascular Congress not as a participant, but with media accreditation in order to report on the proceedings for my blog readers.  I arrived at the gorgeous Vancouver Convention Centre feeling excited to interview as many of the cardiac researchers attending this conference as I could squeeze into my 2-day schedule – particularly all the ones studying women’s heart disease.  I was gobsmacked, however, when conference organizers in the Media Centre told me on my first day that, out of hundreds of cardiology papers being presented that year, I’d be able to “count on one hand” the number of those studies that had anything even remotely to do with the subject of women and heart disease. Essentially, that appalling gender gap then became the Big Story of the conference for me. And every one of those four lonely little studies shared a conclusion that I already knew: when it comes to heart disease, women fare worse than men do.*  See also: The Sad Reality of Women’s Heart Disease Hits Home.

But already, I can tell that this weekend’s annual Congress (once again back in Vancouver) should do better.  This year, the 192-page conference program lists over a dozen studies reporting specifically on women’s experience of heart disease.(1)  Sounds good – until you remember that it’s a puny drop in the bucket for an international conference where over 500 original new scientific papers are being presented about a diagnosis that has killed more women than men every year since 1984. Continue reading “How gender bias threatens women’s health” →