The Price of Advocacy: sowing moral courage in medicine

With a background in internal medicine, hematology, and molecular biology, Dr. Nancy Olivieri has worked in thalassemia, a blood disease primarily of children of emerging countries, for over 30 years, including in Asia through Hemoglobal®, a charity she founded to improve worldwide care for these children.

In 2003, Dr. Olivieri completed a Masters in Medical Ethics and Law at Kings’ College, UK with a thesis examining ethical resistance in medical research. She created and continues to teach a course, Health and Pharmaceuticals, to undergraduate and graduate students, about the influences of the pharmaceutical industry in research and medicine.

In 2021 Dr. Olivieri completed a Masters of Fine Art in Creative Non-fiction at King’s College, Halifax. Her book - What They Knew: A True Story of Drugs, Death and Deception -- is still in preparation. It is not the only book on this conflict: John Le Carré wrote a thriller, The Constant Gardener, based on this scandal, observing that “compared to reality, [his fiction] was as tame as a holiday postcard.”

Jillian Horton, M.D., is an award-winning medical educator, writer, musician and podcaster. A former Associate Dean at the University of Manitoba, she has cared for thousands of patients in an inner-city hospital, and now works to provide care to people living with addiction. She is the winner of the prestigious 2020 AFMC–Gold Foundation Humanism award, recognizing her as a national thought leader in medical education and the delivery of compassionate and humane care. As a teacher of mindfulness, she is sought after by doctors at all stages of their careers, and she leads the development of national programming in physician health for Joule, a subsidiary of the Canadian Medical Association. Her writing about medicine appears frequently in the LA Times, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star, and her first book, We Are All Perfectly Fine, now a national best seller, was released by HarperCollins Canada in Feb 2021.