Ever wished your clinician had more time to explain your symptoms? Or wished they wouldn’t use complicated terms or acronyms? Maybe you wish they were able to speak more concretely about how your condition would affect your daily life. A new program, MedicineX, aims to bridge this gap in health care by using pictures and carefully written stories to make complicated medicine accessible and understandable for the average patient.
“There’s a disconnect between the language that doctors use, and what everyday people understand,” says MedX’s founder Dr. Kim Chilman-Blair, who spent years practicing medicine before realizing that far too few patients fully understood their condition, diagnosis, or treatment.
This disconnect between understanding and education is the primary motivation for the “Medicine Xplained” programs to connect doctors and other health care professionals with expert storytellers and artists to find a better way to communicate the details of complex medical issues. Through storytelling, illustrations, and carefully crafted narratives about real people, Medicine X creates engaging and informative stories that are widespread in their appeal.
For these reasons and more, the U.S. Pain Foundation is excited to announce a new partnership with Medicine X, beginning with collaborating on and publicizing special U.S. Pain Foundation branded materials. As Medicine X continues to expand their offerings and create more stories about more and more different health afflictions and diseases, the U.S. Pain Foundation will signal boost their projects and ensure that the U.S. Pain Foundation’s members know about this helpful and shareable resource.
“We think MedicineX can be a wonderful educational resource to patients, caregivers, and the community at large,” says Nicole Hemmenway, interim CEO of U.S. Pain. “Education is the first step to creating change and improving care.”
Medicine X offers explanations, or “Xplains” a range of medical conditions. For instance, “Migraine Xplained” tells the story of a young woman named Katie who suffers from chronic migraine disease. Her illustrated avatar walks us through the science of her jackhammer-like episodes, but also discusses the ways she has suffered socially and professionally. Medicine X’s stories seem simple, but the knowledge and research behind them is vast: they’re reviewed and approved by medical experts, relevant medical bodies, and proper medical institutions.
“With Medicine X, the stories we’re telling aren’t just a gift of entertainment (though I hope they entertain), but of knowledge, of support, of helping people understand their illness and knowing that they’re not alone,” explains Shawn deLoache, script writer of the Migraine Xplained story.
The U.S. Pain Foundation is thrilled to partner with Medicine X with that same hope: that it will help people better understand and manage their conditions, and realize that others out there are suffering the same way.
To learn more, visit https://www.medicinex.com/.