Five years ago, Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya bravely turned over their main stage to Alexandra Drane and a posse of thinkers, doers, and builders working on removing the real barriers to good health — all the stuff that nobody wants to talk about but which we know is at the center of people’s lives.
Alex called it The Unmentionables panel and it electrified the audience, in part because we identified business and policymaking opportunities, but also because the issues resonated personally. We talked about financial stress, birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, how to increase physical activity among tweens, smoking cessation, how clinicians can have an authentic voice online, and supporting overall behavior change (just to name a few).
Each year has brought a new, incredible line-up of speakers and issues. Here is a sample from each year’s Unmentionables panel:
Unmentionables 2014 will include insights and soulful stylings from (in alphabetical order):
We love Big Data. We collect numbers the way our parents or grandparents saved rubber bands and string. We run charts; graph points; impress with p-values and Ns and chi-square tests.
And we get sucked into the Health Data Fairy Tale. Fat equals diabetes. Smoking gives you cancer. Lack of exercise kills. Eat this, not that (or that, not this) or you’ll surely die.
Each patient becomes the mean. Normal weight means nondiabetic. Nonsmoker means no lung cancer. Marathoners’ hearts beat forever. Vegans, too.
Please, look at me, doctor, not the mean.
Thank you for making the jump from Twitter — what was a haiku turned into a prose poem — a protest poem! Let’s not get sucked into the Health Data Fairy Tale. Let’s hang on to our humanity. Yes!
And I should have proof-read more carefully: Vegans’, too.
Thanks for the opportunity to weigh in. Great topic.
So, with the proliferation of PREVENTABLE FAIL of implanted medical devices (m-o-m hips, surgical mesh, Essure) this topic is tabu? Harmed patients voices are suppressed by a ‘rogue’ industry whose profits are fed by silence.
Thank you, Joleen!
I’m wheels up to SFO so am glad to be able to approve this comment before I go!
Here’s a big fat unmentionable, nay, unthinkable: who’s going to take care of all the old people? There are going to be a LOT of them.
Your post points to it. I’ll post more soon.
Yes! That post, Prepare, features one of the images I’ll present during the Unmentionables panel.
I had a memorial service to attend in DC yesterday, otherwise I’d be at Health 2.0 already to be part of the program led by Rajiv Mehta on future technologies for caregiving. Here’s the full agenda of Health 2.0, by the way, in case anyone wants to follow along on Twitter: #health2con
God bless you, Joleen. Patient harm gets more lip service and less action than anyone imagines. The latest buzz phrase: system failure. In other words, move up the level of abstraction to remove individual accountability.
Dave, I’m visiting my dad (99) in Toronto right now. The caregivers are overwhelmingly immigrants, Filipino, Chinese, Jamaican. Where I live, it’s mainly Romanian and SE Asian. Will their children do this work? Ha ha ha.
I created a Storify of the tweets and images captured by the audience during this year’s panel:
Unmentionables 2014
Let me know what you think!