Documenting the Road to Recovery Using New Media
By Nick Seaver, December 1, 2010
Dr. Elliot Krane, of the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital and Stanford University Medical School and a Mayday Pain & Society Fellow, has a goal to end children’s suffering from chronic pain. One of the biggest barriers to better care for kids in his pain clinic is the lack of coverage for the treatments that will make them well. Elliot wants to ensure that both public and private insurance plans will cover treatments ranging from physical therapy to acupuncture, and that children have more time with all the medical professionals in a pain team.
Elliot and five other Fellows participated in a four-day media and policy advocacy training with us and one day they were exposed to the “Flip Mino” and how to use video as part of a communications strategy. Within less than a week after session in Washington DC, back in his California office, he sent us this email:
“I bought a couple of Flip video recorders for our pain program to give to our rehab patients to chronicle their pain syndromes and recovery. Here is the first result. This was shot entirely by Mimi and edited by her over the weekend. She’s 9 years old.”
Here is Mimi’s video:
Often during our trainings, we remind participants that the messenger—in this case, Mimi—matters. No matter how compellingly a doctor could have told us about Mimi’s procedures and experience, they could not have been as memorable as Mimi.
And here’s the best part: with the increase in cheap equipment and free tools like YouTube or Vimeo, there are countless ways to get your message out.
Elliot will need to talk with policymakers and the media about technical issues like insurance reimbursements to advance his advocacy, but his work is ultimately about children like Mimi. This video is an important piece of his advocacy. It brings this reality to life and in the simplest of ways, Mimi on her own may compel us to act on her behalf.
