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My guest today is Nicholas Kelly, a registered dietitian, speaker, and someone who has spent essentially his entire life navigating medicine from the other side of the exam table.
Nicholas was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in infancy. That diagnosis meant growing up with a chronic disease that required constant attention: medications, treatments, nutrition, hospitalizations, and an intimate relationship with a healthcare system that most children never experience.
But what makes Nicholas’s story so compelling is what he has done with that experience, a story that has inspired me.
He ultimately became a healthcare professional himself, giving him the unusual perspective of being both clinician and lifelong patient. And through his TEDx talk, Healing Through the Human Experience, and his broader work, he has challenged clinicians to think more deeply about something that can easily get lost in modern medicine:
What does healthcare actually feel like to the person receiving it?
Our conversation moves well beyond cystic fibrosis.
We talk about resilience, identity, nutrition, the evolution of CF treatment, the patient-clinician relationship, and the moments when healthcare gets that relationship right and when it gets it very wrong.
We also explore what happens when a child who has spent his life being defined, at least partly, by a serious disease grows into an adult and begins to decide for himself what that disease will, and will not, mean for his life.
Nicholas’s story is ultimately about much more than living with cystic fibrosis.
There is an amazing story within the story about his mother. Listen and find out what she did for him.
Beautiful.
It is about living fully in the presence of uncertainty, finding purpose through adversity, and reminding those of us who practice medicine that treating disease and caring for a human being are not always the same thing.
This is my conversation with Nicholas Kelly.
Enjoy,
Dr. M
