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Bright Pink & Previvors (The Book) Present:
The Empowered Patient Toolkit
About the Empowered Patient Toolkit
Bright Pink is proud to partner with Dina Roth Port, author of Previvors: Facing the Breast Cancer Gene and Making Life-changing Decisions, and the five brave women who came together to share their heartfelt stories in this incredible book, to present the Empowered Patient Toolkit. This one-of-a-kind resource informs and empowers you as you navigate your journey as a young woman at high risk for breast and /or ovarian cancer. Bright Pink and the creators of Previvors know that high-risk young women have a lot of questions when it comes to the doctors they need to see and the information they need to gather from each visit. The last thing we want to do as young women is spend time in the doctor’s office, but if we have to be there, we might as well make the most of it!
The Empowered Patient Toolkit is designed to help you do just that. Using the experience of countless high-risk women who have already been in your shoes and weighed their options, as well as medical experts in each field included in the Empowered Patient Toolkit, we came up with questions that will spark informative conversations with your doctors. The Toolkit will help you learn more about your physicians and yourself as you work together to strategize ways you can be proactive with your breast and ovarian health.
It’s important to note that these are questions to guide a conversation, not a fixed set of criteria by which to judge a doctor. If a doctor does not provide you with an answer you were expecting to one of these questions, make sure to ask for a further explanation and never accept or dismiss a doctor solely based on their answers to these questions. That said, we always encourage you to get second opinions. If you feel that a doctor isn’t listening to you or isn’t giving you answers you feel comfortable with, try another doctor. View this Toolkit as a jumping off point as you begin to build your personal risk management plan and remember that the most important thing is having a team of doctors who are professionally competent and who you can trust and communicate with easily. All young women are different and a medical professional who is right for one person might not be right for another – you need to choose one who is right for you!
How To Use the Empowered Patient Toolkit
Each set of questions in the Toolkit stands alone and is designed to be downloaded, printed out and taken with you to your appointment so you can jot down notes and questions of your own. The sheets are roughly in order from early appointments to appointments you will likely have further down the line, but are not in strictly chronological order. If you are looking to spark a discussion about your risk for developing breast and ovarian cancer with your primary care physician or OB/GYN, you may want to begin with the “Starting the Conversation” sheet. For those of you who are at different stages along your journey, you may want to begin with the fact sheets geared towards breast and/or ovarian specialists. There is no right or wrong way to use this Toolkit. Our only hope is that this is a useful resource, which will inform and empower you as you take control of your breast and ovarian health.
Disclaimer: The Empowered Patient Toolkit should in no way be considered medial advice and Bright Pink and Previvors are not responsible for any medical decisions you come to when using the toolkit.
Starting the Conversation With Your:
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