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The European Journal of Public Health 2007 17(6):543-545; doi:10.1093/eurpub/ckm105
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Public Health Association. All rights reserved.

Viewpoints

Patient organizations and public health

M. Naiditch

Denis Diderot University, Paris, France

Correspondence: e-mail: naiditch@irdes.fr

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.


   Introduction
 
In a stimulating paper in the British Medical Journal,1 Show and Baker described the turmoil produced 15 years ago in the medical profession by what has since then been coined the ‘expert patient’; a patient whose specific knowledge about his disease challenges the power of the medical profession to decide alone the nature and the way his care should be organized. Several alternative models of the clinical encounter have emerged, focusing on the ability of a patient to cope actively with his disease, and emphasizing the ‘patient empowerment’ which is facilitated by the specific knowledge which the patient draws from his experience.2

A ‘patient collective identity’ sometimes emerges from the experiences shared between members of the same disease group. Patient organizations (POs) have been a strong factor in shaping these identities. As a recent special issue of Social Science and Medicine shows, some of these POs have got involved . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Dynamics of patient organizations
 

   Patient association involvement in the fields of research and health care policy
 

   Patient associations, collective interest and equity
 

   What can public health learn from these facts?
 

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