The following is a lightly edited version of a patient testimonial I wrote in December 2014. I wrote it to include as a required element of a letter of intent package for a research network funding application to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research. At the time, I emphasized to the […]
Me, a few years pre-diagnosis: I was diagnosed with diabetes 33 years ago yesterday. I spent a month living in Pasqua Hospital in Regina, Saskatchewan, injecting insulin into an orange, making friends with a little girl with leukemia, and missing school desperately. When I went home, I took Toronto & NPH insulin twice a day […]
My DIY standing desk at my university office “Sitting is the new smoking,” they say. Since I already have type 1 diabetes, I don’t need extra health risk factors. My PhD is in Human Factors, a field that include ergonomics, so I have been familiar with the idea of standing desks for a while. About […]
From an invited talk I gave at The XXXIII FIMS World Congress of Sports Medicine in June 2014 in which I was making a point about the need to think about what is truly important to people:
I have organized a symposium at an upcoming conference in Miami. The topic is medical decision making in diabetes, and the focus is on incorporating diversity. Mila Ferrer is one of our speakers, and we have some very exciting(1) academic speakers as well. “Medical decision making” is academic speak for everything from “helping people with […]
Last night, I glanced at twitter just before going to sleep. (Rarely a good idea, I know.) I noted a tweet posted by the account of the editor of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, a high impact and generally (no pun intended) excellent journal: Simple experiment in #JGIM finds that #diabetes feedback using grades, […]
Note: I originally wrote this post for Emmi Solutions, and it was also picked up by Kevin MD. ~~~~~~~~~ My first week at my new job at a French-speaking university in a city of 95% francophones, I learned a useful new expression: vouloir le beurre, et l’argent du beurre. This translates literally as, ‘to want […]
I’m keenly interested in the design features of online health applications and the way people respond to different aspects of presentation and interaction. One of the things that triggered a set of questions for me was one of the websites I analyzed in my dissertation research, which offered detailed estimates of risks related to prostate […]
I’m at a conference in LA at the moment; it feels so lovely and strange to be able to walk around outside in short sleeves. I took a really excellent short course on Sunday afternoon about the psychology of decision-making, led by Alan Schwartz. At one point, he was talking about the gist paradox. There […]
A number of years ago, I joined a Master’s swim team. I was doing triathlons at the time, and the swim was my weakest leg. The team I joined divided the pool into four lanes: A (fastest swimmers), B (next fastest), C (next fastest) and D (slowest.) Workouts were organized accordingly; faster swimmers were assigned […]
