I make the invisible cost of broken systems visible. Patient expert, keynote speaker, author.
I was sick for ten years. Seven of them bedridden. The medical system didn't know what to do with me. So it did what systems do with things they can't categorize: it made me invisible.
I became obsessed with that. Not bitterly — curiously. Why do people with something real to say go unheard? What actually happens in the gap between what someone feels and what they can say out loud in a room that has power over them?
I've spent fifteen years inside that question. Training 20,000 healthcare professionals. Teaching 15,000 people — most of them sick, exhausted, dismissed — how to speak when everything is working against them. Advising pharma companies. Speaking in 27 countries. Writing seven books. Being the first patient placed inside a medical research institute not as a subject, but as a voice.
I still have ME/CFS. I still have POTS. I still know what it is to perform wellness you don't feel, in rooms that need you to be fine.
The work is always the same: find what the system made unsayable. Say it.
Select keynotes per year. Only when the talk feels true. For healthcare organizations, patient advocacy summits, pharma, and conferences where the work actually matters.
Why the people who need healthcare the most are systematically silenced by it — and what becomes possible when we close the gap between what patients feel and what they can say. For any audience. Clinicians, executives, advocates, the public.
Medical knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. The body arrives with a story the tests can't read. How healthcare professionals can learn to hold both — the data and the person — without burning out trying.
An intensive for people who have been silenced — by illness, by systems, by rooms that couldn't hold what they needed to say. Practical, personal, and built around the specific constraints of chronic illness and advocacy work.
Spanning chronic illness, patient rights, healthcare AI, and the body's hidden architecture. An eighth is in progress.
Three platforms. One philosophy. Constraint as compass.
Social search engine for people with chronic illness. Making patient experience findable. The front door for everyone who's ever felt invisible in a system.
spoons.world →Professional training for people whose qualification is their illness. Five schools. Real employment outcomes. Designed for the body that has to do the learning.
spooniversity.org →Professional credential for working patient advocates. For people already in the field who need the certificate that formalises what they already know.
patient.mba →Essays about illness, voice, body, and the gap between what we feel and what we can say. Written when I have something real to say — not on a schedule, not for an algorithm.
Read Chronically →For keynotes, workshops, consulting, and counseling (from 2026). No intake form, no automated response. Just an email.
hello@roishternin.com