Social Media and The Monster Under the Bed

Join me (and a bunch of other people far more interesting than me) for a special session at the upcoming Children with Diabetes’ Friends for Life conference in Orlando on social media and diabetes support. If you are planning to attend FFL this year, I'd love for you to join us for an exchange between clinical/academic experts and the diabetes online community. If you can't make it to FFL you can join a streaming of the event. DOC members (including your truly) will talk with a panel of clinical/academic experts assembled to specifically to discuss the value of peer-to-peer support and the online community.

Sign up Now!

Participating live or online can help demonstrate the value we in the DOC place on peer to peer social media. If you plan to attend in person, please RSVP by June 28 to P4DC@toniclc.com. (I hope it fills up fast, maybe and early RSVP is better than later.) If you want to join the live stream please fill out this registration. 

We’ll also field questions on Twitter via the #P4DC hash tag on the day of the session.

Here are some more details. 

Partnering for Diabetes Change (P4DC) is a coalition of people living with diabetes and industry representatives aimed at addressing unmet needs in diabetes through community and collaboration. I am honored volunteer my time to help organize P4DC efforts, including this event. I am thrilled that the people at Johnson and Johnson support the community and make things like this possible. P4DC seeks to validate the role of peer support in diabetes management, address the stigma of type diabetes, and ultimately support underserved communities.

You can be a part of the P4DC effort by participating in this live event, and by offering questions either in person or via Twitter. It is P4DC’s hope that through this session, they will be able to make a first step in showcasing the value of the DOC and the importance of social media engagement for patients.

#TwoBits on Green and Orange at CWD Conshy

Children with Diabetes held a tech conference in Philly, will Conshy (Conshohocken) PA over the weekend. A very good friend asked why I go to these. Simple because when it is all said and done I need to recharge the batteries to have the energy to do the right stuff as opposed to the easy stuff. Diabetes Burn out takes different forms with parents, doing to little or even worse doing to much and making diabetes the focus of life.

So for me the focusing on diabetes for a day helps me focus on not over focusing on diabetes the rest of the time.

Here two other great views of the event form around the DOC. Kerri talks about some of the frustrations and diabetes burn out stuff and definitively defines CGM'er and Art Panc.

I finally got to briefly meet another DOC dad, Scott Benner, (Like the DOC needs another Scott, someone needs to do a study of the name Scott and the correlation to T1D.) He is someone I have admired from a far (and someone I swiped a this image from, Thanks Scott). We're both orange but I would say we bleed green.

Love to know who else is orange or green.

The Provider will Teach Your Now

In the last day or so I have seen a a few pieces on the role of phyicians, and patients or providers and consumers. On was a New England Journal of Medicine piece (who would think that I read that rag? - certainly not me) by Hartzband and Groopman titled, "The New Language of Medicine" (1).

It was a good article. I like this part particularly:

"The word “patient” comes from patiens, meaning suffering or bearing an affliction. Doctor is derived from docere, meaning to teach, and nurse from nutrire, to nurture. These terms have been used for more than three centuries."

So to me this suggest that maybe when doctors move away from teaching to a detached paternalistic approach, that projects a perception that they are 'the expert telling the patient what to do' they may have changed the historic relationship. In all fairness, this may be a function of the pressure to see patients and quickly, diagnose and treat before moving on the the next bearer of ill news. I notice there isn't any teaching the sufferer in that little process.

Teaching, it seems to me implies there is a need to for the bearer of an affliction to understand what is going on. Even more it seems to appreciate there is some autonomy in the patient's selection of what to do after said bearer has learned from the teacher.
 
From my experiences as the father of type 1 diabetic teens, the biggest contributor to managing their wellness are great teachers. Some have physicians. Some CDEs. Many have been others who are carrying the same load of daily diabetes care. We have found many of that later group at Children With Diabetes Friends for Life. I am looking at folks like Joe, Paul, Jim and Natalie.

So while Hartzband and Groopman worry about language that demeans the professions of doctors and nurses it seems to me that those professions should also pay attention to the role to teach and nurture and the fact that others outside of the professional ranks help in that process.

(1) N Engl J Med 2011; 365:1372-1373October 13, 2011