Do you know what today is?

Get ready for company, World AIDS Day, for today also marks the start of the first ever Crohn's and Colitis Awareness Week! What a busy day for people with immune disorders! Go out and get yourselves some brown ribbon and make yourself a little pin for IBD education.You can even make it hold hands with your AIDS ribbon, as pictured above.

Here are some tips - snagged directly from the CCFA website - on what you can do to take part in the fectivities (that pun might be kind of a stretch but I'm sticking to it):

• Write to your House Representatives and encourage them to join the Crohn’s and Colitis Caucus,  http://capwiz.com/ccfa/home/

• “Like” the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America on Facebook (www.facebook.com/ccfafb) and follow the Foundation on Twitter (www.twitter.com/ccfa)

• Change your Facebook status to: I’m supporting Crohn’s and Colitis Awareness week and you should too! To learn more, http://online.ccfa.org/AwarenessWeek

• Use the #CCFAawarenessweek on twitter

• Change your profile picture to our logo, download here. 

• Download our Awareness Week Poster

• Reach out to anyone you know with IBD and let them know you care

• Download the Crohn's and Colitis Awareness Week Press Release.

• Visit www.ccfa.org to learn more about the disease

I've admittedly got some personal reservations with the organization, but I still suggest expanding your awareness or sharing your expertise by reading through the forums at the CCFA site, as well as other sites like e-patients and We Are Crohn's and contribute what you can. Do you have advice or simply words of compassion to share with others? Why not start a blog of your own? Or give some readership to the wonderful folks I've got featured on my blog roll? Go on, get to it!

Example: The Importance of Being a Pro-Active Patient

I'm posting this somewhat hastily since I'm on the clock right now, but  e-patients.net just posted a great story by a pro-active patient, Kenneth Spriggs, who created the above infographic charting his medication history over two decades of various inflammatory issues, including IBD. (It's far more impressive than the various spreadsheets I've kept over the years, although if you ask me it could use a few more pooh puns.)

I'm a firm believer in the importance of being a pro-active patient - your history and your data is yours and you should know it more intimately than any doctor you have or will interact with. You will always be one of many other patients and doctors are, after all, flawed humans like the rest of us - even the best will make mistakes or have bad days, which is why I cannot stress enough how important it is to stay proactive!

Check out Spriggs' pet project DIYEHR to learn more about collecting your health data.