Folks Magazine (Amazon/PillPack)
In medicine, plain language saves lives, which is why Jennifer Pearce dedicated her career to helping patients understand doctors, and the other way around.
Jennifer Pearce, the founder of Plain Language Health, was standing in her driveway on a December morning in 2006 when she came face to face with the woman who would change the course of her career.
“One day I picked up the paper from my driveway, and on the front page was an article about a young woman with lupus named Nikki White,” Pearce says. “Here she was, not much younger than I, and [the article] recounted how — through a series of mishaps, miscommunications, misunderstandings, and administrative snafus — she lost her battle with systemic lupus and lost her life at 32.”
Pearce herself was already 15 years into her own lupus journey — an experience so fraught with confusions that it had led her to change careers to patient engagement advocacy. But White’s story in particular motivated Pearce to double down on her efforts. In White’s tragedy Pearce recognized the fate that could all too easily have been her own.
“That’s the day I decided. I already knew how to speak Patient; I needed to learn how to speak Health System. I decided then that I would earn a Master’s degree in Health Care Administration so I could set about effecting change from the inside. . . .”
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