The Doctor Will See You Now
How Creative and Data-Driven Visualization Methods Bring Invisible Illnesses Into Focus
For patients with chronic health conditions, many of which manifest as invisible illnesses, communicating symptoms and obtaining an accurate diagnosis can be a daunting task. For patients on particularly difficult health journeys, repeating their stories to multiple providers can be re-traumatizing, adding stress to an already taxing situation and presenting barriers in care advancement to patients and providers alike. Relaying your health history to your care team can turn into a game of “telephone” between yourself, clinical staff, and an electronic health record system (EHR) that may prove to have limited capabilities when it comes to personalizing the data being collected. With each iteration of the information you’re relaying, a new opportunity to introduce misinterpretation is presented.
Katie McCurdy of Pictal Health has spent two years studying the value of symptom visualization in the patient/provider communication. She has worked hard to advocate for patients who feel unheard and even gaslit by medical professionals, an all too common experience for many. Now, she’s taking what she’s learned and is developing a new, user-friendly app for patients to track their symptoms and present their unique health data to medical providers clearly and consistently. With features including an interactive timeline and the ability to export content via PDF or shareable link, the Pictal App aims to empower patients by making medical communication more impactful and efficient. While the app is not live just yet, you can gather more information and register for updates here.
Drawing Clearer Conclusions
An autoimmune patient herself, McCurdy initially found drawing her symptoms to be a helpful approach in communicating with her medical providers. This practice has come to amass a devoted following in the form of the Graphic Medicine movement, which has been coming together to utilize comic arts as communication tools to improve understanding between patients, medical providers, and caregivers for more than a decade. The ability to transcend words through a mutual visual understanding has proven effective in improving treatment plans, accessing new wells of empathy, and connecting individuals with shared medical experiences in meaningful ways.
Formally defined as “the intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare,” the term “graphic medicine” was formally coined by Dr. Ian Williams in 2007. Since then, a community has steadily developed to build awareness of its uses and expand the incorporation of graphic medicine in care delivery internationally.
Not only does graphic medicine aid in the understanding of patient, provider, and/or caregiver perspectives, it can convey dire public health issues in succinct and eye-catching ways. In fact, cartoonist and educator Whit Taylor, keynote speaker at the 2018 Graphic Medicine Conference, crafted a compelling warning about America’s lack of preparedness for the next big pandemic earlier that year — almost two years before COVID-19 was a blip on the radar of our collective consciousness. Imagine if that warning bell had been heard beyond The Nib’s readership. You can learn more about the 2022 Graphic Medicine Conference happening in Chicago and online if you’d like to get in on the next gathering (which, as an attendee of the 2018 conference, I highly recommend).
Regardless of one’s preferred modality, be it drawing, graphing, diagramming, or all, the ability to convert complicated medical information into more digestible visual information is a promising step forward in cultivating a more compassionate future of health care.
