I am a caregiver. I help coordinate the health and home care for an elder loved one who, for the purposes of maintaining a bit of anonymity, I will call “M.” He is a healthy, happy octogenarian. We have known each other for nearly 40 years, but we are not related by blood. I am […]
Public Q&A: Peer support for parents of teens with cancer
Helen Burstin, MD, reached out to ask if I know of an online peer-to-peer support group for parents of teens with cancer. For anyone who knows Helen: Don’t worry, it’s not for her own family. She is asking on behalf of a friend, who writes: “I’ve been able to find groups for parents of children […]
What if your clinician gave you a prescription to check out a patient group that they knew to be good?
Amy Gleason (@ThePatientsSide) captured this line of mine, delivered on a panel at the Health Datapalooza yesterday. Her tweet generated an interesting cascade of reactions ranging from: “This is potentially dangerous” to “This is obvious (and old news).” I thought I’d expand on my observations and see if people want to expand on theirs in […]
Chasing cures
Bon Ku, MD, a regular on the TV show “Chasing the Cure,” and David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, author of CHASING MY CURE, invited me to join their upcoming panel at the Health Datapalooza. Guess what title we chose? We are nothing if not consistent: Chasing cures. We intend to focus on how open source principles can break […]
Crowd-diagnosing STDs on Reddit
Reddit is a massive Petri dish of human conversation, rife with peer-to-peer health encounters, so I was thrilled when Jane Sarasohn-Kahn alerted me to this article: “People Are Flocking to the Internet to Crowdsource Their STD Diagnosis—Yes, Really.” It focuses on a subreddit (aka online community) devoted to sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs). Kudos to Parade for […]
How might we push power out to the edges of the network?
Cambia Health Solutions’ podcast, HealthChangers, invited me to share a few lessons learned, both personally and professionally. Listen in or read the transcript (below): Leslie Constans: One of the things I wanted to kick off our conversation with was finding out a little bit about this idea of working at the intersection of health and technology […]
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