In August/September, I ventured from Winnipeg to Minneapolis to San Francisco, to the East Bay, to Santa Cruz and Davis, California . . . to simply start the journey that lead me to the campus of Stanford University. I already wrote about the people—so, here are more of the good things. . . and a chance to meet the people and hear their voices and stories, and how technology and social media, engaged patients and engaged providers are changing the realities of medicine, and more importantly, improving patient care outcomes.
Disclosure: Stanford University, Stanford Medicine and Stanford Anesthesia, as well as their partners (including the Kadry Foundation, Eli Lilly, and Boeringher Ingelheim) covered part of my costs to attend Stanford Medicine-X, including part of my airfare, one night of hotel, and a significant portion of my conference fees. As a recipient of an ePatient Scholarship in the Engagement/Producer track, I was required to produce a blog post, video, etc. to share the stories of Medicine X—but, let’s face it, I would have done so anyways :].
Awesome video! Got to live vicariously through you for a bit. I was thinking about how none of the people in the video actually looked like “sickies” (aka they all look young and healthy) and you’d never know they were if you didn’t see them at this conference. Do you think the the people who do look like “sickies” just didn’t have enough energy to attend?
Sorry for the delay replying! For some reason, I haven’t been getting comment e-mails!
I think that there are probably less people with chronic disease out there who *look* sick than those who do. That said, Carly did a panel on “What does pain look like?” and had people who experience chronic pain take pictures of themselves and correlate those pictures with their pain levels: many people rated very high pain levels while *looking* totally okay (this was spawned after a talk in 2012 when a speaker said her current pain level was a 9 yet she was still totally functional). So… More than meets the eye! Also if you think back to 2012 [you saw those pictures, too :)], I was on prednisone and having the worst asthma exacerbation of my life at that point, and (as you know!) you’d never know it from the pictures :].