Author Archives: Holly


me sitting at the edge of a rock face with a baby on my back in a carrier

33 things I’ve learned in 33 years with diabetes

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 […]


Medical decision making and diabetes: Mon Oct 20 2:45-4:15p Eastern

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 […]


Why you want patient partners on your research team 2

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, […]


What Do You Mean, I Can’t Have It All?

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 […]


Health Literacy, Numeracy and Risk 1

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 […]


Data, Information and Knowledge 2

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 […]


The B Lane Swimmer 2

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 […]