It's been just over a year since we began our collaboration with Inspire, a company that builds and manages online support communities for patients and caregivers. Each month, an Inspire-identified patient shares his or her own unique experience living with a rare or chronic illness, and a reoccuring theme has been the patients' desire to to be considered by their physicians a true partner in the care process.
Our friends at Inspire have now compiled a year's worth of these columns in a report (link to .pdf) called "Experts by Experience." It's aptly titled, I believe, and I couldn't agree more with Aanand D. Naik, MD, who wrote a forward to the report calling the writers "inspiring in their honesty, strength, struggle, and perseverance."