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just red this inspiring storey and thought of sharing it.
PAC Mate Enables Blind Medical Student to Achieve her Ultimate Goal
PORTLAND, OREGON - In a few months, the newest doctor – and one of the
first doctors of her kind in the nation – will hang her shingle in the
Portland,
Oregon area. Chris L. Cooke will become one of the first totally blind
doctors in the US with a specialty in naturopathic medicine.
The new Dr. Cooke, blind since birth, will carry the usual medical
instruments in her black bag, including a blood pressure cuff, a
thermometer, and a Pocket
PC crammed with medical references – a tool most modern doctors rely
on to help with diagnosis, prescribing the right medicine, and
ordering and interpreting
lab work. The difference is her tools of the trade will talk. In fact,
in large part, she credits her ability to be a good doctor to a
PAC Mate
™ accessible Pocket PC for the blind and two Oregon men who made
medical reference software accessible to the visually impaired, using
the PAC Mate.
The PAC Mate is the first and only accessible Pocket PC that is
founded on mainstream technology. As such, it does more than talk; it
can run many programs
developed for off-the-shelf Pocket PCs – including medical software.
The PAC Mate also incorporates
JAWS for Windows
®, leading screen reading software that can easily be adapted with
scripts to make those programs accessible for blind users.
Cooke, who at 40 is completing her last months’ studies at the
National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, chose
naturopathy as her specialty
because, “Naturopathy combines the prescription of (standard
manufactured) drugs with natural remedies and emphasizes general
diagnosis, the use of natural
therapeutics and traditional medicine, and we work with diet,
nutrition, life style, and botanical medicine,” she said. “Ultimately,
naturopathy is about
treating the whole body and finding the cause of disease and not just symptoms.”
Naturopathic specialists are licensed in 15 states and all Canadian
provinces. “We study the first two years the same as any MD studies -
pharmacology and
all the basic sciences,” she said. “In the last two years, we do
thousands of hours of clinical work, and study nutrition, natural
therapeutics, homeopathy,
and botanical medicine. That’s where it is important to have
(portable) access to medical research and current information. Medical
knowledge changes weekly.
It wouldn’t be practical to scan all this information and print it. It
would be too unwieldy to have to look through all those printed
resources and keep
them updated, even with sighted assistance.”
“In my third year of medical studies last year, I realized that all
the comprehensive medical reference software out there was moving
toward PDAs (Personal
Digital Assistants, also called Pocket PCs) or the Internet,” she
said. “You don’t always have an Internet connection, so I decided a
PDA would be best
for me.”
Cooke was interested in
Epocrates Essentials
™, an all-in-one mobile guide to drugs, diseases, and diagnostics. “I
looked into what could possibly run this kind of program for me (and
be accessible).
Only the PAC Mate could, so I contacted the Oregon Commission for the
Blind and requested the purchase of a PAC Mate.”
She chose the BX 440 model which comes with a braille display and
Perkins-style keyboard, often used by the blind in place of the
traditional QWERTY typewriter
layout keyboard. The PAC Mate, as with any mainstream Pocket PC or
PDA, allows her to take notes, write and receive e-mail, surf the Web
with an Internet
connection, use a calendar, calculator, and other standard PDA
functions – all made accessible for the blind.
“I really enjoy my PAC Mate,” said Cooke. “I take all my chart notes
on it and print them out on a portable printer that works with it. I
like the flexibility
of having the traditional PDA applications running on my PAC Mate.”
She still had one more obstacle in her way. The professional medical
software written for PDAs was not accessible to the blind.
“I knew the PAC Mate would run the (Epocrates) software, but it would
need to be scripted to be accessible to me.”’ That’s where Michael
Hooks, a legally
blind former assistive technology specialist at the Washington State
School for the Blind, stepped in. Along with his associate, Chris
Meredith who is
totally blind, Hooks owns and operates
Next Level Assistive Technology
, a Vancouver, Washington-based business that serves the greater
Northwest. The company consults with universities, government
agencies, and others on assistive
technology and also sells accessible technology products.
Scripting is the process of writing a series of statements that tells
JAWS how to navigate or what to read under different conditions. With
the blessing
of Epocrates, Inc., Hooks and Meredith began writing a script for the
PAC Mate that would make the software accessible.
“I’ve been writing scripts for JAWS since 1996, basically since its
inception,” Hooks said. “I have a lot of experience, but this was the
first time I had
written a script for the PAC Mate. A week or so later, Chris
(Meredith) and I had it scripted, ready to go, and functional. The PAC
Mate is truly the most
powerful PDA for the blind on the market today. Most (Pocket PC
software) can be installed and will work right out of the box. Because
The PAC Mate uses
JAWS, we can easily script programs to be fully functional. Competing
products don’t have that kind of flexibility.”
“I was amazed at how quickly they had Epocrates scripted for my PAC
Mate,” Cooke said. “I also enjoyed being part of the process, where
(Hooks and Meredith)
were not familiar with something medical, I could give them
suggestions about how it worked best with us. It worked out really
well.”
Cooke practices 12 hours a week in her school’s teaching clinics and a
community clinic. With Epocrates made accessible, “Now I have access
at my fingertips
to diagnosis tools, signs and symptoms of diseases, and causes and
treatments. I also have a lab tool. If I want to order a lab, I know
how much it’s going
to cost. I can interpret the lab work. Within one tool, I also have an
infectious disease component, so, let’s say, if someone comes in with
Strep throat,
I can look it up and see what drugs are usually used to treat it.” She
also is using Pocket Excel on the PAC Mate to set up a 450-item
spreadsheet of medicinal
product ingredients, prices, and pertinent information she needs when
seeing patients.
Hooks and Meredith have gone on to write scripts that make two
additional medical reference guides for Pocket PCs accessible on the
PAC Mate. One program
is a reference manual for the chart codes for diseases. The other is a
series of internal medicine manuals.
“I definitely get great benefit from my PAC Mate with all of these
programs,” Cooke said. “I can look up things during my clinic shifts,
things that all
doctors are expected to look up like drugs and the interactions they
might have and what herbs interact with prescription drugs. I can also
look up side
effects of drugs patients are on now. If I’m diagnosing a potential
disease, I have the explanations there of differential diagnoses, and
I can present
them for a case. Mostly, it’s just a great tool to have for all of
these things.”
With her accessible tools, Cooke said, she can practice medicine on a
level playing field with her sighted colleagues. “The only thing I
need help with
is a student or doctor to assist me with things, like if a person
needs me to look at a rash or needs me to look into an ear.” In fact,
other doctors have
asked Chris to use her PAC Mate to help them rapidly develop treatment plans.
As for her patients’ reaction to her blindness and her unique
accessible medical tools, Cooke says, “Occasionally, a patient is
taken aback for a few minutes,
but because I talk and really listen to them, they really enjoy
working with me. They are always fascinated by the PAC Mate and what
it is. They are fascinated
by the braille display particularly.”
Chris expects to set up her practice in Portland, with a second office
in nearby Newberg.
--
l.pavan("help ever & hurt never")
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