About Us

Being Patient is a trusted, editorially independent destination for news, journalism and educational resources to cut through the noise and create clarity around complex brain health issues and neurodegenerative disease. Our audience is made up of patients, caregivers, people with a genetic predisposition for Alzheimer’s and related forms of dementia, healthcare providers, scientists, researchers, pharmaceutical and biotech innovators.

When journalist Deborah Kan’s mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2014, she found that there was no single place she could go, free of bias, to help her understand the research. Not long after, she decided to leave her career as an executive producer at the Wall Street Journal to reimagine reporting on brain health. 

She launched Being Patient three years later, as a destination for trusted journalism on neurodegenerative diseases and brain health conditions, and as a community platform where all the leading voices in the conversation about diseases like Alzheimer’s — from neurologists and researchers, to pharmaceutical and biotech innovators, to caregiving experts, to patients and their loved ones — could come together, share insights and advance the conversation around understanding, treating, and living a full life with Alzheimer’s. 

Deborah Kan
Being Patient founder and editor-in-chief Deborah Kan

 

Kan’s earliest focus was to find out what patients want to know, and go straight to the expert community for the answers. “When I started Being Patient, patients and caregivers were constantly telling me they felt cut off from experts,” she said. “I also frequently heard people saying ‘How do I participate in this research?’ They wanted to be part of this quest for better treatments and cures — they just couldn’t find a path to get involved. In our earliest days of interviewing experts about our readers’ questions, I quickly realized we were learning as much from the patient and caregiver community as we were from the world’s leading experts on these issues. There’s no other venue where these voices can all come together, on equal footing, and inform one another to advance this conversation around Alzheimer’s and brain health.” 

Today, Being Patient has grown into a trusted destination for science-backed news and educational resources for millions of readers around the world. We want to hear from you – write to us with ideas, insights, and suggestions.