Advocates of which perspective

Skip to Content. Voices on Cancer is an award-winning Cancer. Net Blog series where advocates share their stories and the lessons they have learned about being a cancer advocate. Attorney Meg Gaines found a calling to be a patient advocate after her own cancer experience. After her successful treatment, she wanted to empower other people with cancer to advocate for their care. Her first opportunity came unexpectedly, when her oncologist asked her to help cheer up a patient who was feeling down.

Gaines also helped the patient sort out a billing issue with her insurance company, and this first taste of advocacy left Gaines hooked. She realized that a team-based approach would be able to help more people than anyone could alone. She is now the founder and director of the Center for Patient Partnerships. I had the opportunity to interview Gaines about her cancer experience and the lessons she learned from it.

In this podcast, she shares her story and talks about the importance of patient-centered care. Yes, our objective is that people don't have to do this alone. We want to help them to navigate the process. So, we offer local support groups, and we also have a PNP, that is a peer navigator program, where we match the patient with somebody that went through a similar story, so they can get in touch and navigate this treatment together with that navigator.

We are helping young women to be able to get tested, get the early diagnosis, just to make sure that it doesn't advance in their cases. We are also working on better insurance coverage, because sometimes … health insurance is not covering their prevention, all the surgeries and everything that is necessary for patients with breast cancer.

And another thing now, as younger and younger women are getting diagnosed with breast cancer, we are helping them with their fertility issues. Just to make sure that they can do all the prevention and they can preserve their eggs in order to be able to have children after breast cancer treatment. Well, at the beginning, I would say that it is scary, because they're telling you they're testing new medicine, but clearly now, it's so much more advanced.

Clinical trials are an option when there is no medication that is working for you. So really, it's very important that you participate, not only for your case, but also for future generations.

Also, at FORCE, we have a database of our patients and database of DNA from our constituents, to different research organizations, and they are doing research. So, we can do it a little faster because it takes a long time for patients to do the testing.

Sustaining and fostering physician advocacy will require modest changes to both undergraduate and graduate medical education. Developing advocacy training and practice opportunities for practicing physicians will also be necessary. In this article, as first steps toward building a model for competency-based physician advocacy training and delineating physician advocacy in common practice, the authors propose a definition and, using the biographies of actual physician advocates, describe the spectrum of physician advocacy.