The Language of Respect

Today, I fly to San Antonio for the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS). This is the second year I’ve attended and I’m looking forward to learning a great deal and meeting lots of new people. I’m also looking forward to seeing advocates and allies that I’ve met. It’s like a big family reunion of sorts.

For 2019, the medical oncologist in charge of the education track who works for the FDA in the breast cancer division, Dr Prowell, has set a goal of getting more patient advocates to attend than ever before. I hope she is successful. I think it is vitally important for researchers to be reminded of the human element. Last year, I met several who had never interacted with a real live human patient.

Dr. Prowell also created an amazing white paper on the Language of Respect for all of the medical professionals who will be attending. I remarked last year to several of my colleagues that the conference reminded me of legal conference where the lawyers would often talk disrespectfully about clients, but I was never aware of any clients who wanted to attend.

Medical conferences are becoming more and more open to patients attending and I firmly believe that that is a big benefit to the profession and patients everywhere.

I’ll be blogging and otherwise posting on social media about my experiences, but here is that excellent white paper from Dr. Prowell. It’s worth a read!