On June 22, NPR reporter Richard Knox aired this story during the “Morning Edition” broadcast. It was an excellent piece profiling efforts by an individual and a volunteer organization to help patients and families get the care they need to navigate our health care and elder care systems. Each time the media does a piece on…
I attended a four-day training sponsored by the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C. from June 11-14. It is called CancerGuides II and it was extraordinary. During this training, we learned to create safe, effective individualized programs of comprehensive and integrative care for people with cancer and their families. I met hundreds of practitioners…
The doctors and nurses were using words I could not understand. It was September 19, 1998. I was in the emergency room of a large hospital in Falls Church, Virginia. “I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Russell, but your daughter has a brain tumor.” It was the first time in my life that I fainted. When…
I’ve said in previous posts that we must move to digital records. In the past weeks, I’ve heard horror stories about the inability of medical providers to communicate with each other. I personally know that to be true. I recently asked a doctor treating my daughter if he was planning to inform another specialist (separately…
The March 29, 2009 edition of Parade magazine featured an article about the new specialty of patient navigation. The article highlights some of what navigators can do. For now, the National Cancer Institute has undertaken several pilot projects to train and deploy navigators in medically underserved areas. But as the article also correctly points out, patient navigators…
A cancer diagnosis thrusts patients and their families into an unfamiliar world of doctors, tests and treatment options. They must simultaneously find information, make decisions under pressure, seek the best medical care, cope with family changes, and deal with insurance, financial, employment, caregiver or school issues. Here are 10 suggestions to help you as you…
If you had your own patient advocate to guide you through illness and aging, what would you want to ask them?
