You Are Not Alone

Samantha Reba

It’s a hard concept to understand. After a long day at work, we head home without taking a minute to think about the other hundreds of thousands others who are doing the same thing. It’s easy to feel alone in the world. 

We’ve all experienced death: death of a family member, friend, or pet. We’ve all known someone who has had or is currently battling a life-threatening disease. But in a world that is so big, how can there be others out there who understand and feel the way that we feel?

Health education makes it easier to understand that we are not alone. Through the countless articles, brochures, posters, and commercials, there is hope.

We’ve seen family and friends plagued by illness and death throughout the years. In times like these, sometimes you need more than flowers or a sympathetic card. If you’re feeling lost, alone, or confused, speak to your doctor about educational materials including brochures, posters, or videos. It’s easy to feel alone, but health education can help ease the pain and the burden by instilling the knowledge and understanding that we are not alone.

Artcraft Health Education can make patients feel less alone. The health education information that AHE develops allows patients an understanding of their disease and that they are not alone. In this world, it’s easy to feel alone, but Artcraft Health Education gives you the materials to gain control and understanding of what you’re going through.

For more information about Artcraft Health Education, please visit our Web site at www.artcrafthealthed.com.

About Artcraft Health Education

Artcraft Health Education is a marketing communications agency specializing in educational solutions for healthcare professionals, patients, and caregivers. Our extensive background with pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and medical devices enables us to meet most any challenge in health education. Our patient education materials empower patients to better understand their condition and treatment goals and make more informed treatment decisions. Better understanding by patients can help clients achieve their health outcome goals and marketing objectives. For more information about Artcraft Health Education, please visit our Web site at www.artcrafthealthed.com.

The Power of Empowerment

Linda J. Lipp

Senior Medical Writer                                                                                               

Newton’s first law of motion goes something like this: “An object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion—unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

So what for the newly diagnosed, chronically ill, or disease-progressing patient? What is a positive “unbalanced force” that can shift them out of their feelings of powerlessness?

In short, the answer is patient empowerment.

Empowerment can manifest in many ways and is mostly understood as a process of change. The path to empowerment can be complex and is quite certainly unique.

For patients, self-empowerment can begin with the impact of a diagnosis and may be further developed by ongoing support, educational resources, and participation within their own healthcare management team and among peer-based support groups. 

Practical support can help patients make decisions and regain a sense of control. Moral support can provide encouragement and a sense of direction. Educational tools and resources can help patients have a clearer understanding of their disease or condition, treatment options, side-effects management, and long-term prognosis. Lastly, participation enables engagement, which crowds out isolation and allows for contributions and further growth. 

When you are not well, your illness can very easily become the center of your universe. With patient education, empowerment, and involvement, patients can be moved along the continuum from just surviving to coping better and living more fully—even in the presence of illness.

Do your patient populations need empowerment? 

Artcraft Health Education can help! 

At Artcraft Health Education, we craft innovative and customized educational materials that can help empower your patients every step of the way. At the forefront of our action plans are our CARE™ principles, which guide these materials to be:

·         Clear

·         Actionable

·         Relevant

·         Engaging 

Visit our Web site at:  www.artcrafthealthed.com today to see how we can apply our CARE™ principles to meet your patients’ educational needs and further their levels of empowerment!

Health Education: 140 Characters or Less

Samantha Reba

Junior Writer

It’s the 21st century, and we’ve come a long way. Today’s medical advancements blow away those of the generations before our time, and the Internet is no longer connected to a phone line. The world is changing, and along with these changes comes the use of social media; most importantly, Twitter.

Twitter was first introduced to the world in 2006. Seven years later, it’s more prominent than ever, especially in the field of health education. 

Social media users are interested in up-to-date news, facts, and information. With advancements in technology, medicine, and the Internet, it’s astonishing how much information can be conveyed to an audience in a given amount of characters. 

Twitter offers a constant flow of information on health education. This includes breaking news, trends, facts and statistics, and overall impact of the pharmaceutical industry. Twitter brings people together. Support groups bring together breast cancer survivors and create groups and friends that can offer firsthand experience and support.  Healthy food facts and exercise tweets are a great way to keep followers on a healthy lifestyle track. In a virtual world, it’s easy to gain support from users who are constantly looking to be informed.

To gain even more of a following, hashtags allow users to search a term to see who is talking about it. Whether a user is interested in HPV or Health Literacy Month, they can search the term to see what health education agencies are saying on the subject.

Artcraft Health Education can help! With our newest addition to the social media platform, Artcraft Health Education has brought timely and relevant views, facts, and insights on health education to Twitter.

Follow us at ArtcraftHealth

For more information about Artcraft Health Education and its social media presence, please visit our Web site at www.artcrafthealthed.com.

About Artcraft Health Education

Artcraft Health Education is up to date on the most current news and breakthroughs in the medical and pharmaceutical field. Our services, including social media outlets, allow our audience to gain an insight into the health education field in addition to learning about the most up-to-date news on government medical acts, medical plans, and breakthroughs.

Artcraft Health Education is a marketing communications agency specializing in educational solutions for healthcare professionals, patients, and caregivers. Our extensive background with pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and medical devices enables us to meet most any challenge in health education. Our patient education materials empower patients to better understand their condition and treatment goals and make more informed treatment decisions. Better understanding by patients can help clients achieve their health outcome goals and marketing objectives. For more information about Artcraft Health Education, please visit our website at www.artcrafthealthed.com.

Being Mike Boasso

By Tom Savonick, Senior Medical Writer

If you visit our headquarters in Flemington, NJ, be sure to sign up for the guided tour of Mike Boasso’s brain. Mike, Director of Medical Illustration at Artcraft Health Education, has one of the more interesting brains you’ll ever enter.

Enter most brains, and you’ll find one side of the brain doing most of the heavy lifting. In the brains of musicians, artists, and poets, the right side of the brain turns emotions into rhymes and colors while the left side putters. In the brains of mathematicians, programmers, and surgeons, the left side logically analyzes, 24/7, while the right side dabbles.

Ah, but enter the brain of Mike Boasso and there is equality. Left side and right side sharing the burden as one, teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony. Truth be told, you could enter the brain of any medical illustrator at Artcraft—Doug Walp, Brandon Keehner, or Jamie Rippke—and you’d see that same shared division of labor between creativity and analysis. It’s the nature of the beast for medical illustrators.

A medical illustrator is a professional artist with an advanced education in the life sciences. Medical illustrators must understand the human body at the same level of detail as a doctor or nurse. And, they must be able to artistically render any part of the body in perfect detail to help people understand how it works, or why it isn’t working very well. It’s not a profession for the dilettante.

Medical illustrators train both sides of their brains heavily. The left side absorbs courses in anatomy, pathology, microanatomy, physiology, embryology, and neuroanatomy. The right side develops artistic technique through color theory, instructional design, photography, interactive media development, 3D modeling, Web design, and surgical illustration. The surgical illustration class is likely to include hands-on cadaver dissection, which you may want to consider before quitting your day job.

Medical illustration is still a small field, with fewer than 2,000 trained practitioners worldwide. But demand is growing, driven largely by advances in computer graphics, animation, and imaging. A few years ago, a medical illustrator’s work was most likely to be seen on a poster hanging in a doctor’s exam room, with the title Understanding Your Kidney. Today, medical illustrators are delving into cellular and even subcellular processes. A current 3D animation might be titled Inside the Proximal Tubule. Medical illustrations can even help scientists and laypeople visualize anatomical details and processes far too small to be seen with anything short of an electron microscope.

So, what can the medical illustrators at Artcraft Health Education do for you? That’s a whole ‘nuther subject that I’ll be posting about here in a few weeks. Check this space for the next exciting episode.