Guest Post by Colleen McGuire
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A Conversation with Colleen McGuireWhen I was 10 years old, my mother was diagnosed with advance stage malignant melanoma. While my parents didn’t disclose the severity of her illness at the time, my grade-school intellect could tell the prognosis was not good.
Almost immediately mom did what she does best – took the bull by the horns. She started reading a mountain of books. She changed her diet. She talked to experts in the field. And she became an advocate to others suffering from the same disease. She wasn’t sure how long she was going to live, but she wasn’t going to let cancer bring her down without a fight.
Mom’s determination to survive and manage her health care gave her a new lease on life. Ten years passed. However, as the doctor’s warned, the cancer came back full-bore. We braced ourselves once again for the unthinkable. This time mom didn’t have much to take by the horns since she had changed her lifestyle previously. But the one thing 10 years did give her was technology.
Before Facebook and Twitter, we had chat rooms and bulletin boards. In 1994 mom joined the Melanoma Patients’ Information Page. While it looks archaic today, it is still one of the top resources for melanoma advocacy and information. It is also one of mom’s bookmarked sites she visits daily, now as a 27-year survivor of metastasized stage IV melanoma.
There is a lot of chatter today about health care accountability. Who is responsible? What is the difference between accountability and personal freedom? And my personal favorite, “Well, that’s what insurance is for!”
Googling for health information is one step of patient accountability. However, to be 100 percent accountable for your health care, you have to be engaged. I can read thousands of reports about how bad fatty foods are, but when I’m staring down a jar of peanut butter, those reports are somehow forgotten.
Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous got it right a long time ago. Pulling people together for meetings as a community creates a higher success rate than those who go it alone. With the wide world of social media, shouldn’t health care accountability grow and prosper in this new age? Think about the places where you can participate in an online community to get information and support on healthy lifestyle topics, exercise, clinical studies – the possibilities are endless.
When accountability is incorporated into health care, there can be a domino effect.
- Patient gets information.
- Patient talks to others with similar interest.
- Patient takes steps to change lifestyle.
- Patient lifestyle improves.
- Patient talks to other about improvement.
- Patient health care cost slowly decreases as wellness increases
Not sure where to start? Jump into the conversation. Just listening is okay too.
Dialogue4Health – interaction for health professionals and community leadership
MyHealthyLifestyle – promoting wellness awareness
WegoHealth – empowering health advocates to help others
LetsMove – recent healthy lifestyle campaign launched by Michelle Obama
You can also find a multitude of social media circles on Facebook and Twitter. Still not sure? Ask your health care provider if they know of a local online community that is talking health accountability.
The bottom line – my mother started using social media 16 years ago to get the answers she needed and find a community that understood exactly what she was going through. The conversation has already started. You just have to jump in.
Colleen is Vice President of Communications at IHC Health Solutions, She is the organizer of #stptweetup and can be found on Twitter @colleenmick
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