Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 1! We’ve created this podcast as a free resource to accompany our upcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness.
Episode #4: Step 2: Collaborate – Our Stories is centered on what collaboration with your healthcare team should look like and how that has realistically played out for us in our own journeys (hint: it was messy!). We discuss the types of healthcare practitioners out there and what it means to take responsibility for leading the collaborative effort in your own care. We even chat about nitty-gritty topics that aren’t often touch-on, like firing a provider, recognizing the need for medications or surgery, and the toll that medical debt can take on a person with chronic illness. Again, this is a personal episode, but meant to help our listeners be able to see this step on the wellness journey through an honest lens.
If you’d like to go more in-depth on Step 2: Collaborate, check out the “Evaluating Potential Providers Checklist” or the “Prioritizing Action Infographic,” both in Chapter 2. The checklist can help you ask the right questions as you seek to build a collaborative healthcare team, while the infographic helps you look at all the suggestions from Chapters 1 and 2 and then logically move forward on only those areas that are high priority for you.
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Show Notes:
0:00 Intro
3:00 What is Collaborate?
3:56 Mickey shares when she recognized collaborative care was necessary
The term “key player” is mentioned here, for more detail see the “How Do You Build A Collaborative Team” section of Chapter 2.
6:30 Taking responsibility for leading collaboration in your care
8:10 Describing the types of practitioners (understanding this allows you to choose the right people for the job, more detail can be found in Chapter 2)
Licensed Conventional Medical
Licensed Natural Medical
Licensed Complementary-Care
Non-medical, Non-Licensed
10:00 Angie talks about her experience integrating care
11:50 Patient lead open communication with providers
13:50 Mickey talks about firing practitioners
17:55 The need for medication and/or surgery and our experiences
Where Medication Fits on a Healing Diet
21:40 How to navigate healthcare spending
25:15 Mickey shares about the toll medical debt took on her and her family
29:00 Angie explains how medical debt stirred her to action in her journey
31:20 Realistic look at transitioning a budget to focus on food/self-care
34:13 Your homework for Step 2, Collaborate!
Take a look at the “Prioritizing Action Infographic” in Chapter 2 of The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook to prioritize areas explored in Chapter 1 and 2, before moving on to the next steps in the wellness journey.
35:34 Outro
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The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast is a complimentary resource to our forthcoming book, The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook: A DIY Guide to Living Well with Chronic Illness. Support us in our mission to revolutionize how autoimmune disease is viewed and treated by pre-ordering your copy today!
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