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#WEGO Finalist For Best in Show Blog 2019 (Patient Leader Awards)

Veronique Mead, MD, MA · July 13, 2019 · 2 Comments

2019 Patient Leader Finalist for Best in Show Blog at #WEGOHealthAwards 2019 Patient Leader Finalist for Best in Show Blog Chronic Illness Trauma Studies Veronique Mead MD, MA
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The AWESOME happened and I and we – it feels so much like a WE – became a #WEGO Finalist for the 2019 Best in Show Blog.

My desire was to spread the word about the science of trauma, how it affects risk for chronic illness, and why it’s not in your head.

Thank you guys for all that you did with your support, speaking out, voting, submitting comments, sending well wishes and more.

Becoming a #WEGO Finalist

It’s an honor to be a part of the amazing group of #WEGO patient leaders (there were 6000 nominees this year) who are doing so much in the world to offer hope and support and tips for the journey and for healing.

While we didn’t win the Best Blog award, becoming a finalist was a huge and touching win on its own.

It’s a win for all of us who are using the science of trauma to make sense of our symptoms, find empowering tools that support healing, and to know that being sick is not in our heads.

It’s a win for all who are educating our doctors, friends and family; who are learning how to stop judging ourselves and our bodies and others; who are growing in our abilities to love and accept who we are just as we are … and more.

You can see all of the finalists for each of the 15 categories and learn more about what this means on #WEGO’s website.

The section below is the first blog post I wrote on this topic after having been nominated for the health awards.

July 2019 Nominated for the #WEGO Patient Leader Awards

#WEGO Finalist for Best in Show Blog Chronic Illness Trauma Studies Veronique Mead MD, MA #WEGOHealthAwards 2019 Patient Leaders

Thanks so much for nominating me for the #WEGO Patient Leader Awards you guys and for all the comments and endorsements you made!!

It’s an honor – and provides our community with an opportunity to help medicine learn about the science of trauma and why it’s not psychological.

We had 544 votes at the closing of the #WEGO voting on July 28th and I feel like we accomplished something significant regardless of what happens.

You also left 37 comments!

15 of your extraordinarily thoughtful comments are visible on my profile page (I was really moved to learn how my work has been helpful to you – thank you).

You left another 22 comments (!!). These were not made visible because they were anonymous but each one of them was read by someone who approved each nomination.

As we’ve discussed here in the past weeks, becoming a #WEGO Finalist and winning would give me the chance to speak about trauma to health innovators & other patient leaders.

Health leaders who will be attending the October conference I’d be going to if I won include speakers from medical schools, health insurance companies, Mayo Clinic, organizations focusing on specific diseases such as the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF), other patient leaders, and more.

You Voted to Inform Medicine

You’ve voted to inform health care professionals about the large body of research explaining how difficult events, adverse experiences that affect us emotionally and trauma can all increase risk for chronic illness – and how healing unresolved trauma can help with decreasing, managing and even healing symptoms of many diseases.

As so many of you know, this is what I write about on my blog and have shared in my own story of discovery and gradual recovery over many years of disabling exhaustion from chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and other symptoms.

Your vote supports spreading the word about how chronic illness can be traumatizing (and doctors contribute) as well as the research I write about that increases risk for so many chronic illnesses:

  • adverse multigenerational experiences (AMEs)
  • adverse babyhood experiences (ABEs)
  • adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)
  • adverse childhood relationship experiences (ACREs) and developmental trauma
  • adverse institutional experiences (AIEs)
  • adverse pre-onset experiences (APOEs)
  • events that trigger flares after onset

The message you guys have sent feels clear and I feel buoyed, honored and excited to be a part of this growing movement that is so empowering for everyone – patients, health care professionals, families and beyond.

What A #WEGOHealthAwards Win Offers

Let's plant seeds and share the trauma science - #WEGO Finalist to Win Patient Leader Award for Best Blog 2019 Veronique Mead Chronic Illness Trauma Studies

I feel quite uncomfortable promoting myself, yet my passion to open medicine’s eyes to the huge body of evidence explaining how adverse life experiences shape our health keeps calling and pulling at me.

It’s why I blog and why I spend so much time integrating and writing about the research.

Medicine has trouble keeping up with the science. It’s the nature of the beast.

But despite a deep desire to help, putting lives on hold to complete training and to do the work that often takes long hours and that can be very stressful – many medical professionals still often cause harm to patients through a lack of awareness and unrecognized bias. I still regularly hear and read about other patients who have experienced judgement, or who have been shamed and treated with out-of-date notions that anything to do with trauma implies a psychological cause or that their physical symptoms are all in their heads.

What I continue to see and hear from you guys is that many health care professionals still routinely tell you your symptoms are due to weakness, personality flaws, laziness or pretending (read Mechanical Engineer Dr. Gary Sharpe’s thoughtful story about his recent hospitalization for a crisis of his early onset Parkinson’s disease).

Few doctors or patients know about the hundreds of adverse childhood experience studies (ACEs) and other research showing how trauma increases risk for disease. And why it’s physiological, not psychological.

So I hope to have a chance to spread the word about the science of trauma and help educate fellow health care professionals and others in the field.

This opportunity is for everyone who wishes their doctors and nursing staff, their friends and family and colleagues could “get it” about the very real and painful effects of trauma and just how much more pervasive and subtle it is than most of us have ever realized.

Learn more: #WEGO awards FAQ and The HLTH conference FAQ.

Thank you everyone for being a part of the CITS journey!

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How Trauma Shapes Disease #WEGO Patient Leader

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Comments

  1. Shelli Worrall says

    July 27, 2019 at 11:22 pm

    Veronique’s research on chronic health issues in relation to trauma is an amazing collection of both vast information and insightful wisdom. It gives those with chronic illnesses new hope for healing at the very core of their trauma wound.

    Veronique has been very helpful in my journey with Type 1 diabetes offering insight on how stress drives this disease and how to find a manageable direction in pursuing a healthy and balanced lifestyle.

    Reply
    • Veronique Mead, MD, MA says

      July 28, 2019 at 9:51 am

      Dear Shelli – I’m so glad it’s been helpful and that it offers the hope I so want to convey! I’m also thrilled for how you’ve been finding your empowered way with your T1D after all your hard work :-)

      Reply

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I love hearing from you. I read and review every comment before publishing it to make it visible to everyone. Your stories and insights make the writing and running of my blog so worthwhile. Although your email is required, it is not made public. You can use any name you wish. How do you work with your health? What has helped as you've become an expert in your own right? Does understanding the science of trauma make your journey any easier? Is there anything you need or wish I wrote about more?

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About Me

Hello! I'm Veronique Mead. On my blog I look at how chronic illness may be a natural response to one or more overwhelming experiences of threat. While this includes infections and toxins, I specialize in the role of psychological and physical trauma. Because the research - still overlooked and underestimated by medicine - has knocked my socks off.

 

Symptoms, it is turning out, may not be caused by mistakes our bodies are making but because our nervous systems have gotten stuck in states of fight, flight or freeze. Our bodies are our best friends and risk everything to help us survive. We are designed to recover or at least begin to heal from the effects of those survival strategies. I never knew any of this as a family physician or assistant professor. And it’s not in your head.

 

I've been testing these ideas with my own disabling disease for the past 20 years (I am much improved and get a little better every year). I share the research, challenges, why some things that seem so logical do not work for everyone (or make things worse), as well as my favorite 11 tools. This is so you can explore what might help you stabilize, improve or possibly even begin to reverse underlying drivers of your chronic illness too. For an overview with links to my most important posts, start here.

Awarded Top 100 Chronic Illness Blogs

#WEGO Patient Leader 2019 Finalist

#WEGOHealthAwards 2019 Patient Leader Finalist for Best in Show Blog Chronic Illness Trauma Studies Veronique Mead MD, MA

I and we - it feels so much like a WE - were among 6000 nominees for 15 categories of patient leader awards and one of 5 finalists for Best in Show Blog at the #WEGOHealthAwards. Learn more here.

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