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Introducing Rheumer Has It: Busting Myths and Highlighting Evidence for Rheumatic Diseases

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Episode 1: Rheumer Has It, Episode 169 – Arthritis Life Podcast

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Summary:

Welcome to the very first episode of Rheumer Has It! Hosts Cheryl and Eileen kick things off by sharing their own journeys with rheumatoid arthritis—from diagnosis to daily life—and how those experiences inspired them to create this podcast.

In this candid intro episode, you’ll hear how they met online, bonded over the challenges of living with RA, and teamed up to make science-backed info more relatable and easier to understand. Their mission? To bust myths, share real stories, and offer practical tips to help you feel more in control of your health.

Whether you’re newly diagnosed, supporting someone with RA, or work in healthcare, this podcast is here to empower you with insights that actually make a difference.

Episode at a glance:

  • Cheryl’s and Eileens’s Journey with Rheumatoid Arthritis: Both Cheryl and Eileen share their journeys with RA.
  • The Birth of Rheumer Has It Podcast: Cheryl and Eileen discuss how they first connected online through their advocacy work, which eventually led to the creation of Rheumer Has It.
  • What to Expect from Rheumer Has It: Compact, information-dense content from Cheryl, Eileen, and experts. 
  • Debunking Myths and Misconceptions: Cheryl and Eileen discuss how this podcast will debunk myths and misconceptions about rheumatic diseases and spotlight scientific evidence in a down-to-earth, digestible format.

Medical disclaimer: 

All content found on Arthritis Life public channels (including Rheumer Has It) was created for generalized informational purposes only. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Episode Sponsors

Rheum to THRIVE, an online course and support program Cheryl created to help people with rheumatic disease go from overwhelmed, confused and alone to confident, supported and connected. See all the details and join the program or waitlist now! 

Speaker Bios:

Eileen Davidson Bio

Eileen Davidson, also known as Chronic Eileen, is a disability and chronic illness advocate from Vancouver BC Canada. Living with a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, she spends a large focus on volunteering and creating awareness around arthritis. With The International Foundation for Autoimmune and Autoinflammatory Arthritis (AiArthritis) Eileen is the Educational Media Assistant. Along with AiArthritis, Eileen is a member of the Arthritis Research Canada patient advisory board, and author with over 100 published articles.

Cheryl Crow

Cheryl is an occupational therapist who has lived with rheumatoid arthritis for over twenty years. Her life passion is helping others with rheumatoid arthritis figure out how to live a full life despite arthritis, by developing tools to navigate physical, emotional and social challenges. She formed the educational company Arthritis Life in 2019 after seeing a huge need for more engaging, accessible, and (dare I say) FUN patient education and self-management resources.

Episode links:

Full Episode Transcript:

[00:00:05] Eileen Davidson: Welcome to Rheumer has It, the podcast that busts myths, highlights evidence and inspires hope for living better with rheumatic diseases. 

[00:00:13] Cheryl Crow: Through plain language interviews with experts, we offer actionable knowledge so you can thrive today.

[00:00:18] Eileen Davidson: My name is Eileen.

[00:00:20] Cheryl Crow: My name’s Cheryl.

[00:00:22] Eileen Davidson: Join us as we bust myths.

[00:00:24] Cheryl Crow: And spotlight evidence.

So today we’re gonna introduce ourselves a bit and share a little bit about why we started this new podcast. So, you might recognize my voice. I’m Cheryl, I’m a 43-year-old mom, and I’ve been living with rheumatoid arthritis for exactly half my life.

And I’m also an occupational therapist, and I created the Arthritis Life Podcast and the Rheum to Thrive Support program.

[00:00:52] Eileen Davidson: My name’s Eileen. You may know me online as Chronic Eileen. About 10 years ago, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at age 29. At the time, I was working as an aesthetician and I had zero knowledge of autoimmune diseases, let alone rheumatic diseases. Of course, I had to know all about them when I was diagnosed.

I started my blog Chronic Eileen in 2017 and since then it has connected me with people like Cheryl and inspired my drive to make educational content as somebody who is going through the journey of living with this disease and coming from without a medical background.

So that’s really important so that people can understand a little bit better. 

[00:01:31] Cheryl Crow: Yeah, and I know, I just wanted to let you all know if you’ve been a long time listener to the Arthritis Life Podcast, typically, I do spotlight long form personal stories and provider interviews that help you feel less alone and more equipped to thrive.

On Rheumer has it, I’m going to be joined on all The Rheumer has it episodes by co-host Eileen, and we wanna do a little bit more compact, information dense episodes really focused on debunking myths and spotlighting important evidence in the field of rheumatic disease. 

So we first, Eileen mentioned that we both met each other online because we were both doing similar work with sharing our personal stories, and ways that we were figuring out how to live well with rheumatic disease and make sense of all the maybe conflicting information and advice online.

I really loved Eileen’s blog and how she was so down to earth and gave “real talk” about what it was like to be a single mom with RA. Eileen and I, to give a little more background into our origin story, we actually met in person for the first time at the American College of Rheumatology Conference in Atlanta, Georgia in 2019, right before the pandemic.

[00:02:47] Eileen Davidson: Yeah, so that was the first time that we met in person, even though we only live about three, maybe four hours apart. Yeah, I’m in Vancouver, BC and Cheryl is in Seattle, Washington. So this will be our project on rainy days.

And ever since that one conference, we have probably met up at a number of conferences since, and we’ve collaborated on projects from online for other people living with forms of arthritis to presenting at the American College of Rheumatology conference as well.

We particularly talk about a lot of the hidden symptoms of rheumatic diseases and the stigmas, myths, and misconceptions about them.

And yeah, so I first found Cheryl in actually the Mama’s Facing Forward Group. She, there was a picture of her sitting there with all the medication around her, and that so resonated with me because I was at the same time working at creating, you know, how do we make our invisible illness visible?

So that really caught my eye and that’s kind of how we met. 

[00:03:53] Cheryl Crow: Wow. I’d forgotten that actually until today. Yeah. I do wanna give credit to the photographer, I hired my friend Jessica Keener to do what I call the “invisible illness photo shoot.”

And that was inspired, I wish I knew the person’s name, it was inspired by someone else with an invisible condition who had done a similar project. They were laying on their couch and they had all their injections and medication bottles in front of them.

And I thought similarly, I had an immediate visceral reaction of this is so powerful. When you live with an mostly invisible, hidden illness, there’s just so few ways of making it clear to people that this is actually a serious condition.

So I was happy to be able , to hire her to help make it as visually appealing as it could be. And then I also found, yeah, the Mama’s facing Forward group by Mariah Leach as just a lifeline, as a you know, new mom living with rheumatoid arthritis.

So it’s been really fun for Eileen and I to kind of connect further over the years, work more academically on some papers and I think or on, on some research projects.

And I’ve been really inspired by how Eileen has been involved in so many research projects as a patient partner. And that was something that has really just in the last 10 to 15 years started happening where researchers in all chronic conditions realized that we need to involve patients in the all aspects of research.

And so this is, this podcast is a bit of a extension of that and a way of looking at the fact that so often research doesn’t make its way out of the ivory tower or the really, really expensive medical journals, and we really wanna find creative ways to bring research to patients.

So I’m gonna give it back to Eileen to talk a little bit more about why we formed this podcast and what our purpose is. 

[00:05:39] Eileen Davidson: Yeah, so there is a lot of reasons I wanted to create this podcast. One is that on average, it takes 17 years for research to hit clinical practice, and I have been on the Arthritis Research Canada Patient Advisory Board since 2018.

Now, I have participated in a number of studies, many different kinds, or listen to researchers present their findings, and then ask us as patients, how can they get this information out to the greater public. This could be, you know, information about comorbidities, new medications, exercise guidelines, all sorts of things.

And so I wanted to highlight some of the interesting research that the researchers that I collaborate with at Arthritis Research Canada are doing.

And then I’ve also really wanted to start a podcast called Rheumer Has It, ’cause I thought it was a really catchy title. And also to define like, myths, stigmas and misconceptions and bust them because there are so many when we live with rheumatoid arthritis from, it can be cured with these herbs, it’s not that serious, it’s just joint pain.

There’s also many things when I asked Chad GPT to tell me as many myths, stigmas and misconceptions about our rheumatic diseases, it literally gave me a list of a hundred.

So, I just thought it would be really important to you know, have two people who have lived experience with the condition as well as bringing in researchers who, or clinicians who can really speak to busting those, the wrong sayings that you know, are about rheumatic diseases, and highlight the evidence behind it.

A lot of their work can, and the facts behind their work can really be eye-opening and tell you, you know, herbs are not gonna cure our disease. It would be great if it was that easy, but it’s not gonna happen.

So that’s why I really wanted to start Rheumer Has It, and I, I wanted to partner with Cheryl because she has much of the same vision as me, and we’ve worked on other projects in the past.

And not gonna lie, I wanted her platform so we can get this information out to all these people!

[00:07:50] Cheryl Crow: Yeah, no. And similarly, you have a following in, in as well. We wanna combine our powers, combine our visions.

I wanna make sure, you know, if you’re listening, you might be like, wait, who is this podcast for? And similar to the regular Arthritis Life podcast primarily when we’re speaking, we’re going to be speaking to a patient audience, a lay audience.

But we also want this to be extremely value packed for anyone who cares about people with rheumatic disease. Whether you’re a caregiver, a healthcare professional, a student, a sibling, a parent. Anyway I know my mom listens to every episode. Hi mom.

Building off of what Eileen mentioned, you know, I think that there, what I’ve observed as an occupational therapist, as a rheumatoid arthritis patient I think one of the hardest things is balancing being open-minded with being skeptical and science-based and evidence-based.

I think that a lot of times there’s two different poles, two different ends of a, of a spectrum. One is like, somebody who might be the most scientific based by the book will say, you shouldn’t spend any time or any energy on anything to do with your illness, unless it’s a hundred percent evidence based and been subjected to numerous randomized control trials.

That’s, the science part of my brain is really attracted to that, and the anxiety part of my brain is attracted to that black and white. Yes, I should only do things that evidence based.

On the other side. There’s the people who are like, well, let’s be open-minded. Like lack of evidence doesn’t mean evidence of a lack. And that’s a huge, huge distinction, right? .

We wanna help build literacy health literacy, medical literacy, help people do those risk benefit analyses in their lives.

And also, you know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and with the current political climate, this is a quote said by Daniel Boorstin. It says, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance. It is the illusion of knowledge.” Which is huge, right?

There’s a lot of people out in the autoimmune world who, they, they think they have all the answers. The answer is, you just need to go on this herb. You just need to go on this diet. You just need to do this or that. And we wanna help patients make sense of how, like why is it that some of those claims are bogus, and where do we draw the line between bo outright bogus claims like this herb will cure it and areas where there’s, it’s a gray area.

Does that make sense? As a long wind away of saying that? 

[00:10:21] Eileen Davidson: Yeah, no, I completely agree.

Like there, there is sometimes a lack of evidence behind certain things like diet nutrition, certain herbs like turmeric and whatnot, because the studies are either really hard to do or they’re just not really done. Or they’re done poorly or they’re done in a very small fraction amount of people.

And we always have to remember that what works for one may not work for another.

 I guess like the goal of this podcast would be just to educate and inform and inspire, empower people with scientific evidence, being able to put those questions and concerns into words, and hopefully communicate with their healthcare professionals better, or people in their community.

One thing they could do is show, one of these podcast episodes if you have somebody who is very adamant on, you know, x, y, Z will help you, but maybe the evidence doesn’t show that.

So, there’s so many purposes for this podcast, and I hope that we we fit a gap that is out there and help patients access research or information faster and in a easy to digest way.

Because a lot of the time, this stuff is very hard to understand and like, how is it relevant, relevant to our lives too? 

[00:11:38] Cheryl Crow: Right. A lot of times the more academically rigorous or evidence-based something is, the more dry and boring it is. So something that I think you and I both like, the challenge of.

The challenge is to make this down to earth, fun to listen to, you know, and super information packed and, and helpful.

And so we are going to be interviewing some experts and bringing in their perspectives too. So you’re not gonna just be hearing from Eileen and I.

Some episodes it will be just the two of us, other times we’ll have an expert. And you know, you’ll also hear q and a style discussions maybe between us.

And if you’re wondering what else to expect, right now our, our goal is to have them bi weekly or, or every other week. So if you’re subscribed to the Arthritis Life Podcast, you’ll hear that Rheumer Has It episodes twice a month, roughly.

And then the traditional Authorized Life podcast style, you know, longer form interviews personal stories, and some provider tips too, a couple times a month as well.

[00:12:38] Eileen Davidson: Another thing too, on the episodes that we don’t have a guest, Cheryl and I will be discussing either something to do with rheumatic diseases and then also kind of telling you some important things, either with research or going on in community or something really interesting and juicy that we learned that week.

[00:12:59] Cheryl Crow: Yes, I love it. So just really quick logistical point. If you’re already subscribed on your favorite podcast platform to the Arthritis Life Podcast, you don’t need to take any further action. These Rheumer has episodes will all just show up on your feed.

You also, if you want to see a video of this conversation or read the show notes, to see all the details, including hyperlinks to things we discussed in a transcript, make sure to check out the show notes. So it’ll live on both of our websites like chronic eileen.com and mine, my arthritis life.net. 

[00:13:33] Eileen Davidson: Well, thank you for tuning into the first and opening episode of Rheumer Has It. We are really excited for the journey that we’re gonna be going on, creating this content for you.

Please let us know what kind of things you would like to learn. What myth, stigmas, or misconceptions about rheumatic diseases do you want us to bust and highlight the evidence for 

[00:13:56] Cheryl Crow: Yay. Thank you so much. We’ll see you later. Bye-bye for now. Bye.

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