Dear Be the Choicers,
Premiers from across Canada are meeting today to address the multiple challenges and dysfunctions that seem endemic to our healthcare system. At Be the Choice, we support any solution that breathes public accessibility and increased equality into our health choices. This is, in part, why we’ve been advocating that the Canadian Taskforce on Preventative Health Care lower the age of breast screening from 50 to 40. Over 1,000 women die annually in Canada due to this policy. Black and racialized patients are burdened disproportionately and a new study shows that this is the case more generally in cancer research.
Resources such as Be the Choice, which we have been steadily building and updating for the last 12 years, don’t offer a solution to the complex problems that the healthcare system faces. We do like to think, however, that we’ve made a small impact on the 35,000+ that have used our Decision Trees.
What we know for sure is that the Decision Trees have saved lives, including most recently of our co-Founder, Melanie Adrian. As she was updating the information featured on the trees, she read about a new study that may apply to her, so many years after her original diagnosis. She thought she should check it out. Never would she have thought that she would be re-diagnosed, but she was. She has just finished her first round of chemo+immune therapies and can’t wait for them all to be over.
Melanie’s experience exemplifies how important it is to have resources such as Be the Choice; resources that are updated routinely, that translate complicated medical know-how, that patients can trust. We need a more robust healthcare system, but it is also true that we need more informed and empowered patients to generate new ideas on how to make a revised system work better.
At Be the Choice, we’re working every day to support patients by keeping our resources fresh and up-to-date. If you wish to support Melanie and all those cancer patients (newly diagnosed and newly re-diagnosed) out there, please be part of our work and send a donation (by e-transfer) to: morgan@bethechoice.org.
XOXO,
The Be the Choice Team