advocacy ethics

Balance in All Things – We Create a World of Good

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Since moving last month, I now live not far from Orlando. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know the tragic and horrible events that have surrounded this city during the past ten days. From the killing of a promising young singer, to the mass murder of 49 young people, to a toddler’s death by alligator. I didn’t directly know anyone involved, but I can certainly speak to the pall that has been cast. The horror, followed by the myriad resulting emotions – sadness, dread, apprehension, and certainly the anger… Contrasted with those events, this week my inbox featured …

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Tough Questions, Informative Discussions, and Opportunities to Count Our Blessings

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From 2006 to 2010, I hosted a weekly radio show, sponsored by Upstate Medical University (Syracuse, NY). It gave me the opportunity to interview truly knowledgeable experts in every aspect of medicine and healthcare you can imagine. It was an incredible learning experience. I would walk away from our recordings each week realizing that for every iota of information I knew or had just learned, there were millions of iotas I didn’t know, would never know, and might never even know to ask about. Gratifying, brain-stimulating, and sometimes overwhelming. Included in the conversations was a monthly feature that focused on …

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When Clients Lie

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Years ago, I hosted a radio show where I had the opportunity to interview medical providers from many specialties about their work with patients. One of the recurring themes was that “Patients lie.” Now – you might wonder why that would become a theme, but the answer is quite simple. It was important to discuss it during the show because smart patients need to know that their providers assume they are lying as a part of the diagnoses or treatment they provide. (Good advice for smart advocates, too.) Here are some examples: An anesthesiologist told me that patients are always …

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Patient Advocates and The Kindergarten Principles

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You may remember Robert Fulghum’s book, published in the 1980s, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten… The book is a group of essays focused on the wisdom that helps us lead a good life – basic tenets including sharing, being kind to one another, cleaning up after ourselves and living a balanced life. The book and its basics have come to mind so many times in recent months during exchanges with some of the patient advocates who have reached out to me. Their outreach, a mix of questions, complaints, reports and misinformation, leaves me scratching my …

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Mixed Messages Are Just a Lawsuit Waiting to Happen

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A few weeks ago, I wrote Fool Me Once, Shame on You, But Fool Me Twice about the problems that can hurt patient-clients which also hurt our profession because they violate our ethical principles and best practices. Those problems range from advocates working beyond their own abilities to help clients because they may not have the experience or education to do so, to selling medical products on their websites, and others. Today we’re looking at the promised Example #2 of this problem in hopes of a hard stop. That problem: the danger of mixed messages. As stated in the Fool …

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Fool Me Once, Shame on You, But Fool Me Twice….

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From bold-faced lies to misrepresentation – facts that aren’t facts, withholding information, skirting the code of ethics, and shades of truth – honesty and the advocacy business have been on my mind. This topic was actually triggered by something that has nothing to do with advocacy at all, something that seems relatively innocuous, but then, maybe not-so-innocuous at all: the purchase of a 5-lb bag of sugar to bake holiday cookies last December. Now a 5-lb bag of sugar has always been a 5-lb bag of sugar and has yielded a certain number of batches of cookies. I’ve been buying …

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