Tag: Ed Yong

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”. 

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What I learned from writing my most-read ‘Heart Sisters’ articles in 2023

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 17 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters  

Five months after my heart attack, I attended the 2008 WomenHeart Science & Leadership patient advocacy training at Mayo Clinic – the first Canadian heart patient ever accepted. I learned so much from my 44 American heart sisters – ages 31 to 71 – who also attended that year, and of course from our rock-star faculty of female cardiologists from Mayo and beyond, brilliantly led by the one and only founder of the Mayo Women’s Heart Clinic, Dr. Sharonne Hayes.♥  When I returned home and started writing and speaking about what I’d just learned at Mayo, my public relations friends teased me: “This is what happens when a PR person survives a heart attack: you just keep writing, speaking and looking stuff up – because that’s all you know how to do!”  And they were so right! Here’s my annual overview of what I’ve been learning while writing some of the most-read posts this past year:         .     Continue reading “What I learned from writing my most-read ‘Heart Sisters’ articles in 2023” →

Women’s misdiagnosed heart attacks: the COVID long-haulers of cardiology

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 5 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

Ed Yong, my favourite Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer over at The Atlantic, wrote recently that, when he first started reporting on the medical phenomenon called “long-COVID” (meaning ongoing debilitating COVID symptoms that continue far longer than eight weeks), few scientists or physicians knew that it existed – and more importantly, many even doubted that it did:

“Some researchers still hesitate to recognize long-COVID if it doesn’t present in certain ways; they’re running studies without listening to patients. Long-haulers are growing frustrated that what is self-evident to them – that their condition is very real and in need of urgent attention – is taking a worrying amount of time to be acknowledged.”

That paragraph beautifully captures what women whose heart attack symptoms were initially dismissed have described as well – that sense of not being listened to during a heart attack that was “very real”.    .     .    .

Continue reading “Women’s misdiagnosed heart attacks: the COVID long-haulers of cardiology” →