The Personal Impact of Medicine

Caroline of Grateful Foodie has extolled the virtues of our friend Henry Ehrlich, of AsthmaAllergiesChildren.com and I wanted to write a little about his latest guest editorial.  It's a personal account of one man's 40+ year journey with asthma, and his treatment with a recently FDA-approved treatment that changed his life.

I was speaking with our friend, Henry, about it, as I was wondering how he comes upon these fresh perspectives and accounts for his site.  He said that Tony Cook showed up as a new Twitter follower and when he saw that Cook was the first patient to get this procedure outside a trial setting he seized the opportunity.  Henry said,  "We had done a couple of pieces on BT [bronchial thermoplasty], but from 'above'.  Getting a patient perspective--that was news.  I'm very grateful to Tony who is really generous and anxious to share his good fortune."

I am grateful to both Tony for sharing his story, and to Henry, for bring Tony's story to us.  I think it's very important that we keep in mind the tremendous impact medical advances can have on someone's quality of life.  So often, even as a lay person, I find myself swimming in journal articles, reading through research publications, but it's great to see the human side told.  So many decisions in medicine come down to quantifiable factors, but the human factor needs to be continually brought to the forefront and should be given great weight, even though it cannot be physically weighed or measured.  These treatments are for people, so I'm glad to read stories that talk about people, and how they've been helped.  

Thank you, Henry, for continuing to do what you do, and I hope that all those in the medical research communities can remember for whom they do what they do and that their advances can result in real change in a person's life.