WELCOME TO THE WEBSITE OF WENDY S. HARPHAM, a doctor of internal medicine, 33-year cancer survivor, best-selling author, nationally recognized speaker and patient advocate. Dr. Harpham has used her useful perspective to help patients become Healthy Survivors: “Survivors who (1) get good care* and (2) live as fully as possible.”
[*good care = high-quality care in keeping with their values]
Since her diagnosis, she has played an important role in raising awareness among clinicians and empowering patients to talk about the challenges of survivorship, such as coping with post-treatment fatigue, raising healthy children when a parent has cancer, participating in clinical trials, and finding hope that helps patients become Healthy Survivors.
Dr. Harpham’s overarching mission has been to help patients make informed decisions about everything that impacts their ability to live their best life. Along with providing facts, her work shares insights and tips for acting on that information in helpful, hopeful ways. A defining area of Dr. Harpham’s work has been her writings on healing hope, the centerpiece of her knowledge-hope-action approach that enables patients to narrow the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.
To foster Healthy Survivorship, Dr. Harpham put out a call-to-action for the oncology community to adopt a single definition for “survivorship.” Her proposed definition — “the science and art of making life the best it can be after a cancer diagnosis”— prompts patients and healthcare professionals to return to the roots of the survivorship movement premised on moving away from victimhood and toward empowerment and hope “from the time of diagnosis on.”
To read or participate in a discussion of healthy survivorship among patients, clinicians, caregivers and anyone interested in modern medical care, visit Wendy's blog: Dr. Wendy Harpham on Healthy Survivorship.
NEWS:
Starting with her 2/20/22 column in Oncology Times, Dr. Harpham began writing in real-time about her latest health challenge of aplastic anemia. Until then, she’d used her 17-year-old award-winning column to write only about challenges she’d already adjusted to or moved beyond. Her treatments have worked well, and she has started work on her next book.
A Hope to Share with Patients Waiting for Test Results (OT; February 20, 2022)
Dr. Harpham's bio (Video) 15-min keynote for Nat’l Academies of Sciences
Finding Hope That Heals — free e-Book! (Video) Texas Women's Hall of Fame Induction