The Lemon of Illness and the Demand for Lemonade

The Open Mind:

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind. And it’s been a number of years since I first joined at this table in a no-holds-barred conversation with Dr. Jessie Gruman, the founder of the Center for Advancing Health, a non-profit institute designed to translate health research into effective public policy and private practice.

I titled our first programs together “Rx for Health Policy and Practice”.

Later, we would discuss my social psychologist friend’s compelling After Shock – What To Do When The Doctor Gives You or Someone You Love a Devastating Diagnosis … which the late great physician Robert Butler called “a humane and immensely important book about coping with a catastrophic disease.”

Still later, we parsed my guest’s informative guide to the care we Americans could take of our health. She called it The Experience of the American Patient: Risk, Trust and Choice.

And since Dr. Gruman hasn’t been reluctant to talk about her own horrendous encounters with heart disease and cancer when they seem to be teachable moments in the public interest, I would ask her if risk, trust and choice have served her well enough.

And I wonder if she would also discuss her recent essay “The Lemon of Illness and the Demand for Lemonade”. What did you mean by that, first of all?

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