Empowering the Patient – Part 1

My grandma was a trendsetter. She was the first woman in town to wear trousers and she always said a woman wasn’t made to stay at home all day and got a job, plus she made the best meals ever. Christmas eve in 2005, she was feeling quite depressed. She didn’t want to take care the cooking and nothing seemed to cheer her up. In the next few weeks my grandma got a lot worse, she started moving awkwardly, in a very clumsy manner, and she entered catatonic states plus she got disoriented a lot. We went to the doctor, who assigned her a series of tests as well as visits to specialists, changes on medication, etc. After a while, she was diagnosed with depression and a bipolar disorder. The medication left her sitting on a chair, unable to move and barely able to say a word. This period was so bad that she can’t remember most of what happened (she doesn’t remember anything about the day my sister got married, just from the pictures). We were really unhappy with the diagnostic and the strong medication that

Internet in the practitioner’s office.

Internet is a great source of information for patients and medical staff, games are starting to swift into an attempt to produce healthy lifestyle and there are applications in our phones that help us control some aspects of our health everyday. There is a lot to talk about and I promised a post about Health Games that I am preparing, but I wanted to share something about the internet and the well-informed patient first, something I wrote a while ago.

Today when people feel sick, they can go to the internet and learn what may be happening to them without talking to a doctor. After their research, they decide if they need to see a doctor, need treatment or even additional screening.

We have what I call «well-informed patients» now that know what they want out of the medical staff and installations. Before, usually patients were

Internet en la consulta

Internet es una gran fuente de información para pacientes y personal sanitario, los juegos empiezan a cambiar en un intento de crear tipos de vida menos sedentarios y hay aplicaciones en nuestros móviles que nos ayudan a controlar algunos aspectos de nuestra salud día a día. Hay mucho de lo que hablar y he prometido hablar de los «Health Games» en una entrada que estoy preparando, pero quería compartir algo sobre Internet y el paciente bien informado antes, algo que escribí hace un tiempo.

Hoy cuando alguien se encuentra mal, puede ir a Internet y buscar qué puede estar pasando sin ir a visitar un doctor. Después de la búsqueda, pueden decidir de ir a un doctor, si necesitan tratamiento o incluso las pruebas que necesitan que se les realice.

Tenemos unos usuarios hoy en día que yo llamo los «pacientes bien informados» que saben lo que quieren del servicio médico y sus instalaciones. Antes los pacientes venían sin tener mucha idea de lo que les pasaba aparte de un resfriado o un virus que estaba de paso por el vecindario. En teoría, estos