Thirty-three doctors. Seven years bedridden. Self-diagnosed, self-rehabilitated — then made Patient-in-Residence at two world-class institutions. I know exactly how systems break people. And how to fix them.
Represented by AAE Speakers Bureau ↗
Most speakers with chronic illness tell you how they overcame it. I'm the one who spent ten years performing recovery while secretly relapsing every few months. What changed wasn't my body. It was my willingness to stop performing.
33 doctors. 7 years. No answers. So I built a new system. This talk on radical self-advocacy and patient power became the foundation of everything that followed.
Every engagement is bespoke. No off-the-shelf programs. I work with organizations ready to stop performing transformation and start building it.
A talk that doesn't let the room off the hook. Radical honesty about the cost of systemic exclusion — and a structural path forward that leadership can actually use. Works for any industry, any audience size.
AI is already practicing medicine. The question isn't whether to use it — it's whether it will understand the patient in front of it, or only the data about them. A talk built on lived experience and hard research, for audiences navigating AI's arrival in healthcare, pharma, and patient-facing services.
Multi-month engagements and 12-month advisory retainers. Audit, co-design, and sustained implementation — not reports that gather dust. I stay until the change is structural.
What your organization loses when people cannot tell the truth about being sick. Not a conversation about wellness — a working session on the structural cost of performed health. Your team leaves with a concrete framework, not a feeling. Repeatedly the highest-rated session of the day.
For clinical teams, patient experience leads, and digital health decision-makers navigating AI implementation. We examine what AI can do, what it cannot, and how to close the gap between algorithmic output and genuine human care. Practical. Evidence-based. Unsettling in the right ways.
Seven books spanning chronic illness, patient rights, healthcare AI, and organizational systems. An eighth is on the way.
The book that started everything. Seven years. Thirty-three doctors. No answers. This is what happens when a patient stops waiting for permission to understand their own body — and what it means for every person navigating a system not built for them.
Not what they ask for in the appointment. What they are actually trying to say. A practitioner's guide to the gap between clinical language and human experience — and the cost, in outcomes and trust, of leaving it unclosed.
AI is already practicing medicine. Most patients don't know it. Most clinicians don't either. An unflinching examination of how algorithmic systems are reshaping diagnosis, trust, and the patient-physician relationship — from the perspective of someone who has been on the wrong end of both.
The practical companion for clinicians who know something is missing in the room but cannot name it yet. Concrete communication strategies rooted in the reality of what it feels like to be a patient — not a case file.
What most public speaking books teach is performance. This one teaches presence. The difference between a speaker who moves a room and one who merely fills it — written by someone who had to learn how to speak again from scratch.
Remember that thin, silvery film you have to peel off a chicken breast? For centuries, anatomists treated its human equivalent the same way — as inconvenient packaging to be discarded before the real work began. They were catastrophically wrong. This is the book that tells you what they missed.
Takeda, Boehringer Ingelheim, and AOP Health have purchased copies for hundreds of employees. Bulk orders come with personalized bookplates, custom forewords, and optional virtual Q&A sessions with Roi.
Professional practice, media movement, and education — each reinforcing the others.
I don't take every engagement. I take the right ones — organizations genuinely ready to transform, not just perform. If that's you, let's talk.
Print-ready one-pager for event organisers and bureaux.
Speaker · Author · Narrative Medicine · "I study the stories bodies tell — and the systems that refuse to listen to them."
Roi Shternin spent seven years in bed with an undiagnosed chronic illness — losing first the ability to walk, then to speak — while being told, repeatedly, that nothing was wrong. He eventually diagnosed himself, studying medicine horizontally, one hour at a time. He then taught himself to walk again.
He has spoken in 27 countries, advised Fortune 500 companies, and served as Patient-in-Residence at major healthcare institutions. He is not an academic who studies illness from the outside. He is someone who has lived it all the way to the labwork.
"He said the thing I've been trying to say for years and couldn't. I felt seen for the first time."
"Not like a stranger. Like a brother. He said what I have been living but could never articulate."
"I thought this wasn't going to be relevant to me. It was the most relevant talk of the day. I left thinking about three people I manage differently."
"He touched something that most speakers are paid to leave alone. The room was completely still."
"I've been performing recovery for ten years. I didn't have a name for it until this talk."