The Global Genes RARE Advocacy Summit in September 2023 provided a forum for me to talk, for the first time, about my upcoming book and how rare disease communities have been a key part of my professional life. Here’s a set of questions that Sravanthi Meka of Global Genes asked me in advance of the meeting: […]
Champions
Wow! How? Patient-Led Research
A scientific journal article written primarily by patients about their health condition has been downloaded over a million times. We reached this milestone after years of activism, advocacy, and demands for justice. The internet supercharged everyone’s ability to connect with information and with each other. The crucible of the pandemic then forced us into new […]
Wow! How? Gleevec
When Norman Scherzer’s wife, Anita, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in 1994, he found that the most up-to-date information was being traded among patients who were connecting via email. When a new test, a new drug, and a new clinical trial were all developed at the same time, Scherzer helped organize the […]
Wow! How? End of life
What if I told you that a key health care metric grew in a positive direction, from 24% to 31% in 15 years? What if I then told you that a big part of the change was driven by people inspired by personal experiences, not clinical training? Most Americans tell survey researchers they don’t want […]
Wow! How? Public Access to Research
This is a cross-post from my LinkedIn newsletter. Feel free to join the conversation there or post your thoughts in the comments below. The U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed indexes over 36 million biomedical research abstracts – a searchable trove of evidence that has been available to the public since 1996. It is both a national […]
Patient-led innovation
Update: Here’s a link to the list I created based on the comments gathered here and on Twitter and LinkedIn. I am curating a list of organizations that are putting patient-led innovation to work. What follows is an incomplete list — please help me by sharing YOUR favorite peer-to-peer communities in the comments below. Extra […]
Recent Comments