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Monday, September 10, 2012

The Patient Movement

Last night was a challenging night for me. I have been off social media for sometime. Oh I will pop on here and there but mostly I have taken a step back.

Tomorrow morning I am scheduled for a test, which as a patient with a chronic illness I am use to. But this test requires me to be off all my medication for several days except my blood pressure meds. I forgot how bad my daily symptoms are without these meds. I have a better appreciation for pharma, because without these medications my quality of life would be a constant struggle.

Back to the topic... The Patient Movement. I thought during my night hours of dealing with my symptoms I would visit twitter. I wanted to get my mind off of what I was going through. What I read at first made me angry, then very sad and disappointed.

So I spoke up. I spoke up publicly and called out 2 doctors for reprehensible behavior. Yes, these doctors have been called out before, and one has a disclaimer basically stating to read his tweets at your own risk.

If I look back at my tweet history I think there was a time I actually defended one of the docs stating they needed an outlet too. I was naive.

Well what I read last night left me feeling vulnerable as a patient. So, I know I can't change the behavior of these two doctors only they can. I just hope they take the time an consider what they say in public does impact patients. It impacted me. I hope I never have to cross paths with these two doctors, but how will I know? They hide behind being anonymous. They are cowards. It is time for them to choose a new profession.

Funny thing is they both have a lot of followers both patients and doctors, what does that say for the patient movement?



my personal fave: The Gram stain of phlegm from AIDS pt with pneumonia... showed SPERM.







4 comments:

  1. Kari,
    Patients may follow these docs bc they provide nuggets of truth to feed on, or bc they want to feel (and be seen) as part of the clique. There's a lot of cliquishness in SoMe, just like real life. Normal human behavior, though annoying to many. And a lot has been written about Docs being anonymous in SoMe, mostly negative. I don't follow any; chances are they have an ax to grind. That said, I've always found it easy to ignore those who I don't agree with, and in the ine case where a non-anonymous doc became hostile to me I hit "Block and reort Spam". Never heard from him again.

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  2. Great advice and well received. Thank you. Learned a valuable lesson in social media today. So valuable I wanted my children to learn from it, they read every post. And I must say, I am proud of there responses it lead to a conversation on being tolerant and respectful.

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