I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease when I was 19, after being very ill for quite some time. I managed to push through the disease and excel through college and law school, and eventually became a trial lawyer, until the Crohn's disease got the better of me and stopped me in my tracks. Shortly thereafter, I developed gastroparesis. I no longer could function as a trial lawyer, so instead, I started providing free legal and insurance assistance to patients with chronic illnesses nationwide. My organization is called Advocacy for Patients with Chronic Illness. We serve about 1500 patients per year, all for free. You'll hear more about this in articles I will be writing for EmpowerHER. I'm glad to be here and look forward to getting to know you.
How do we make the invisible visible? I talk to people with chronic illness every day who are homebound and paying a terrible price for their illness.
• A little kid being referred to truancy ...
August 20, 2011 - 12:21pm
Have you watched or heard about this reality TV show called Hoarders? It’s what it sounds like -- people who save everything until trash completely dominates their home and their life. I’ve ...
August 20, 2011 - 12:18pm
The first time I met Gloria Steinem was at a Voters for Choice fundraiser. We'd spoken by phone before that -- I'll never forget the first time I heard her unmistakable voice on my voicemail. My ...
August 15, 2011 - 4:13am
We have a very tough case at the moment – a young woman with an eating disorder who needs long-term residential treatment, but her insurance company thinks two weeks is enough. The injustice of ...
August 9, 2011 - 5:23am
I recently reviewed a disability insurance denial to try to help a patient develop a strategy for how to proceed to try to get her disability. Under her disability insurance policy, she was ...
August 3, 2011 - 3:48am
I’ve read all of the health reform laws, as well as most of the regulations. So I consider myself pretty well informed on the subject. It’s my job to be up to date on this. After all, I answer ...
July 19, 2011 - 7:47am
I have been asked to give a talk to a number of other patients with Crohn’s disease. The topic has been left up to me, but they don’t want the usual summary of the law or a tour of the health ...
July 12, 2011 - 5:08am
I work 12 to 15 hours a day, five days a week. That would be a lot for a healthy person; for a person with two serious chronic illnesses, it’s near insanity. What it means, though, is that I ...
July 6, 2011 - 3:31am
As I’m sure you know, several states and others have sued to try to stop the health reform law from taking full effect. If you’re not a lawyer, it’s hard to follow exactly what’s going on, so I ...
July 1, 2011 - 6:56am
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as health reform) provides several benefits of interest to women.
First, preventive care is free. This includes your annual ...
June 13, 2011 - 4:41am
It is no secret that women make up a majority of the approximately 25 percent of Americans who suffer from chronic pain. Chronic pain conditions such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, ...
June 8, 2011 - 3:07am
This has been an unusual year for us at Advocacy for Patients with Chronic Illness. In previous years, come the fall, we’ve gotten a load of requests for assistance from parents of students with ...
June 2, 2011 - 4:24am
The past month has been tough for me. Actually, several months. We lost an insurance appeal that really was about life and death, and the reasoning was so perverse and so wrong that it was ...
June 2, 2011 - 4:22am
The Commonwealth Fund released a report on May 11, 2011 on the state of women’s health. It’s not good.
Women typically have greater health care needs than men, especially during their ...
May 12, 2011 - 4:51am
If your application is denied, it's important that you appeal rather than giving up and starting over. When you win, Social Security often pays you a lump sum that covers the period from the date ...
May 10, 2011 - 4:37am
I get a lot of questions about Social Security disability. The most common question we get is whether there's any way to speed up the process. The truth is that, if you're denied at the initial ...
May 9, 2011 - 4:37am
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protects people with disabilities from discrimination, and requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for disabled employees. That sounds ...
May 2, 2011 - 4:15am
My colleague, Nicole Netkin-Collins, spent a semester in Australia last year, and wrote a thesis on paid parental leave that surveyed the law in several countries. I learned a lot from her, so I ...
April 19, 2011 - 5:30am
Chronic illness is different from illness that gets cured and illness from which you die. It never, ever, ever goes away. It may go into remission, but it’s always there, like a sleeping dragon ...
April 19, 2011 - 5:25am
We conducted a study with our partners at the University of Michigan Center for Managing Chronic Disease on the obstacles facing the chronically ill and the strategies used to surmount them. The ...
April 6, 2011 - 5:50am
I’m a 53-year-old lawyer with Crohn’s disease and gastroparesis. I had a pretty exceptional career as a trial lawyer until my Crohn’s disease stopped me, nearly dead in my tracks.
I started ...
April 5, 2011 - 12:40pm
Jennifer Jaff commented on Anonymous' post is there any evidence that someome Crones is more likely to become an alcoholic?