If you haven’t listened to the Patient Voices series on The New York Times site, let me be the first to recommend it.
I spend quite a bit of time writing up survey data, working with moderately large respondent pools (N=2,253 is the number of people who completed my last health survey; N=609 is the number within that sample who are living with high blood pressure, etc.)
This morning I decided to listen to Patient Voices: Scleroderma as I crunched some data (N=269 – people with lung conditions; N=193 – people with heart conditions…). What struck me, as I listened, is that there is something powerful & human about listening to patients tell their stories. So many people are living N=1. Not just because they have a rare condition, not just because they’ve been told their case is unique, but because they simply are individuals going through life, and health is just one aspect of who they are.
And of course the “N=1” idea comes straight from Gilles Frydman’s quote at Health 2.0 Paris. See today’s other post, about patients and online communities: http://e-patients.net/archives/2010/08/patient-communities-which-way-forward.html