Take Charge of Your Health Patients with diabetes,
heart disease, and arthritis are embracing a self-management plan that dramatically
improves their lives. So why won’t insurers pay for it? By MARY A. FISCHER
In 1998 Sharon Janis and her
husband took a month-long
vacation in Europe to celebrate
their retirement. Janis, then
54, had been a branch manager for a water and power
company in Los Angeles; her
husband, a high-school history teacher. It was a beautiful
spring day in Paris when they
visited the Louvre, but their
idyllic outing suddenly shattered when Sharon fainted
and fell down a flight of stairs.
The diagnosis: type 2 diabetes,
the chronic illness that had
killed her father.
A short, obese man who owned a
deli, Janis’s father often came home
with high-fat, high-calorie goodies: macaroni and cheese, pastrami,
cheesecake. Janis was heavy as a
child, and throughout her adult life
she kept piling on the weight—
reaching 175 pounds in her early 20s and
topping 265 by the time she turned
40. “I never gave a thought to what I
was doing to my body,” she says, even
as she watched her father suffer from
one diabetes-related illness after another. He had one leg amputated and
was scheduled to have the second one
removed when he lapsed into a coma
and died.
But the fall at the Louvre scared
Janis. The next month she accompanied her mother, who was also a
diabetic, to a new chronic-disease self-management workshop developed
arthritis, diabetes, and hypertension,
Janis realized that if she didn’t take
charge of her health, “I could end up
like my father.” Or her mother, who
died this past August from diabetes-related heart failure.
DAN SAELINGER/CLARE AGENC Y; PROP S T YLIS T: WENDY SCHELAH; HAIR AND MAKEUP: PATRYCJA FOR HALLE Y RESOURCES
Nearly half of all adults in America live with at least one chronic disease.
by Stanford University, which offered everything from diet advice to
tips on communicating with doctors.
Midway through the six-week workshop, after listening to the stories and
struggles of other patients who had
