Jessie Gruman, founder and president of the Center for Advancing Health since 1992, died July 14, 2014. She was 60.
Gruman advocated for policies and practices based on her own experiences of treatment for five cancer diagnoses, interviews with patients and caregivers, surveys and peer-reviewed research. She had five cancers, starting with Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 20, followed by cancers of the cervix, colon, and stomach. At 59, she received the diagnosis of metastatic lung cancer.
She was the author of AfterShock: What to Do When the Doctor Gives You – or Someone You Love – a Devastating Diagnosis; Slow Leaks: Missed Opportunities to Encourage Our Engagement in Our Health Care; A Year of Living Sickishly: A Patient Reflects; The Experience of the American Patient: Risk, Trust and Choice; Behavior Matters; as well as scientific papers, opinion essays and articles.
This is an excerpt of an article that was published in full in The Cancer Letter.
