What we do

Our client want­ed to un­der­stand what trig­gers pa­tients who are not sat­is­fied with their cur­rent RA-med­i­ca­tion to ask their physi­cians to switch them from DMARD to a bi­o­log­ic. The client al­so want­ed to know how suc­cess­ful they were with this re­quest.

An­tje Schaf­frani­etz: “We asked all of the re­cruit­ed re­spon­dents to con­duct on­line di­aries and en­cour­aged them to en­gage with each oth­er through on­line dis­cus­sions that we de­lib­er­ate­ly did not mod­er­ate – we were just lis­ten­ing. Their res­ig­na­tion and ac­cep­tance of their ‘fate’ was very un­nerv­ing. These peo­ple suf­fered from so much pain and in­creas­ing mo­tor im­pair­ment, yet they did not ap­proach their physi­cians to ask for a change in their med­i­ca­tion. And most of them did not even ac­tive­ly look for in­for­ma­tion about po­ten­tial al­ter­na­tives! This taught me, that for many ther­a­peu­tic ar­eas in Ger­many, there’s still a long way to go in terms of pa­tient em­pow­er­ment. As a con­se­quence, our client is now work­ing on an ed­u­ca­tion­al cam­paign for bi­o­log­ics to help peo­ple make an in­formed de­ci­sion.”

Lis­ten­ing of course doesn’t just work on­line. Of­fline we rec­om­mend you book our For­est Walk for ac­tive lis­ten­ing when your re­search top­ic is es­pe­cial­ly sen­si­tive. Why does this work? We know that for most peo­ple, an out­door walk in na­ture is very con­ducive to hav­ing a dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tion – be­cause be­ing out­doors and on the move in­spires your brains and your soul to open up and start talk­ing.