Portraits of resilience: How patients and caregivers cope through the COVID pandemic

Portraits of Resilience: How Patients and Caregivers Cope through the COVID Pandemic By Richard Tsai The word “storytelling” invokes a pleasant image of listeners around a campfire, listeners from any era and any culture. It could, however, just as accurately evoke an image of brain chemistry that creates direct experience and even changes behavior: I originally discussed this concept in an earlier post, “Why Storytelling Builds Brands.”1 Research shows that people remember stories better than mere facts and that the brain can store more information and retrieve it more easily when it is in story form.2 Storytelling [...]

Next Generation Online Health Communities

Next Generation Online Health Communities: Data empowering patients and caregivers improves care and accelerates research By Richard Tsai The World Orphan Drug Congress USA 2020 (WODC 2020) provided four days of powerful panels and keynotes about collaborations, successes and failures in creating what rare disease patients and families need and desire most – effective treatments for their conditions. In one failure turned to success, Kim Stephens shared her story involving inappropriate clinical trial endpoints. Stephen’s son has Hunter Syndrome, an extremely rare inherited condition where children lack an essential enzyme in their cells that eliminates waste . [...]