quotable quotes - August 2013

“Being the best patient you can be is about helping your doctor be the best that they can be, because patients are in charge of this disease more than any other.”

- Dr. Sean Oser (Penn State University College of Medicine, Hershey, PA) on getting the most out of doctors’ appointments, with Dr. Tamara Oser (Penn State University College of Medicine, Hershey, PA) at the Children with Diabetes Friends for Life conference in Orlando, FL, July 9-14.

“Some providers tell me, 'Every time one of my patients goes to Friends For Life, they come back wanting a pump.' And I go 'GREAT!"

- Dr. Jill Weissberg-Benchell (Northwestern University, Chicago, IL) on a panel about social media and patient support at the Children with Diabetes Friends for Life conference.

“I have done my diabetes management for 14 years, and this is exponentially better than I have ever done.”

- A camper who participated in Dr. Ed Damiano and Dr. Steven Russell’s bionic pancreas camp study this summer, commenting on the remarkable glucose control he achieved while using the bionic pancreas. Read more in our learning curve this issue.

"The missing piece to solving diabetes is in this room. It's the people with diabetes, and it's families with people who have diabetes. We've developed a system to make the trials go more quickly."

- Dana Ball (T1D Exchange, Boston, MA) on the 26,000-patient T1D Exchange registry at the Children with Diabetes Friends for Life conference.

“Patients are giving back and contributing to research for their own cure: There are 750 million people in the world living with an incurable condition. That means that there are 750 million people who can be experimenters. This is a new way of practicing medicine. It's about empowering patients to help us learn, which fundamentally changes what it means to be a patient."

- Sean Ahrens, (Co-founder, Crohnology, San Francisco, CA) at Rock Health’s Health Innovation Summit in San Francisco, CA, August 8-9.

 “In behavior change, ability matters more than motivation. The return on investment on simplifying things is much bigger than trying to sustain motivation.”

- Dr. BJ Fogg (Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, Palo Alto, CA), during his keynote entitled “How to Change Human Behavior” at AADE. Dr. Fogg breaks behavior down into three components: trigger (a cue that tell you to do the behavior), motivation (how much you want to do the behavior), and ability (how capable you are of doing the behavior).