I arrived back from India on Saturday 16 February. Monday was President’s Day so I did not go to work. Tuesday I returned to work and prepared for the Choosing Wisely phase II press event. I had left Varanasi in good health but I think I ate bad food either at the airport or on the plane, and upon returning to the US I was sick. I tried to concentrate as best I could at work because I wanted to be sharp for the conference. Wednesday I was to travel to DC, and I did, but I rearranged my schedule to see a doctor first. She threatened to only test me for bacterial infection rather than give me antibiotics. I had been experiencing stomach problems since Saturday and wanted antibiotics and did not want to wait until the test results were returned and upon getting another appointment. I also had to wait for four hours to get into the walk-in clinic near my home.
The doctor gave me antibiotics at my request and I got better by the time I awoke the next day, but it still made me think about the prescription process and about the Choosing Wisely campaign. Part of that campaign was advice that doctors and patients should talk together, and I was in the mood to demand antibiotics against my doctor’s advice to get tested first. After having been sick for days with no relief I attributed my recovery to the antibiotics.
The conference was on Thursday 21 February and was great. I saw some coworkers that I wanted to see after coming back plus the organizers did well to invite lots of journalists, and many people asked me about the connection between the campaign and Wikipedia.
At this press event an additional group of medical societies agreed to participate. With the new participants, the majority of medical specialty organizations were now participating in the campaign, and I got new perspective on how important this campaign was. Also, the speakers introducing the event (Jim Guest and Chris Cassel) both dropped the number “22 million” as the number of access requests for the information which I had distributed through Wikipedia. I reported that number as the number of pageviews received by the Wikipedia articles into which I had inserted the campaign messages. This was a significant percentage of the campaign’s total outreach, and there is a lot of room for further expansion. I am actually after many iterations of my work just formalizing what it is that I should do and share, and I am really excited about further outreach. I find the work I have to be entirely aligned with what is important to me.
After the press event we from Consumer Reports went to a lunch with donors to the organization. This event was a way to thank people in the area who had contributed money to Consumer Reports’ campaigns and also to ask them for more money. The first time I recall ever going to such an event was, coincidentally, when I went to a fundraising event for the 2000 presidential campaign of Ralph Nader, who was formerly of CR’s board of directors. At that event it was a novelty to me to see how polite attendants of Nader could so sweetly and directly ask attendees for lots of money. I was just a student fan at the time, but I remember being impressed and thinking that if causes need money then someone must request that money.
I got engulfed into conversations with just a few of the attendees. I really had no plan going into this lunch and it happened that I had a lot in common with each of several of the attendees, all for different reasons. If I had the lunch to do over again I would have been more of a butterfly around the room because in hindsight, I am sure that I had a lot in common with a lot of the people there and I wished that I could have met more of them.
The entire experience was striking to me for several reasons. I watched the organization of the press event, and I was thinking, “This is how mass communication happens.” I watched the representatives at the press event make statements for their organizations, and I was thinking, “This is how organizations back grassroots social movements and start something big.” I went to this lunch event after and met all these donors, and I was thinking, “This is how activists with a bit of money leverage it through organizations to effect a particular change in the world.”