About
Decipher Your Health is a blog hosted by Marijke Vroomen Durning, RN, and Karin Molander, MD, FACEP, conceived to help educate the public about healthcare and the healthcare system.
When Marijke and Karin met, they realized they had a lot in common regarding how they think about healthcare, patient care, and how patients and their loved ones can and should be involved in health matters and decisions. They decided to work together to answer many of the questions they encountered throughout their career. Their partnership allows them to present both a nursing and a medical point of view, which sometimes are the same and sometimes vary, although they both work towards the same goal: helping people.
Marijke Vroomen Durning is a registered nurse and health writer in Montreal, Quebec. She graduated from nursing in 1983 and worked for many years in several clinical areas. She often tells people she has, literally, worked in areas “from life to death.” Her first job was in post-partum, working with newborns and their mothers. Her last positions were in long-term care and hospice. In between, she worked in general medicine, occupational health, school and camp health, infection control, and more. Marijke has also worked in leadership roles, such as head nurse, in-service teaching, supervisor, and clinical instructor.
Marijke began writing health information part-time in the 1990s as she continued working clinically. Over a decade ago, she switched to full-time writing. She has written for many publications and sites for the general public and professionals. She also wrote the book, Just the Right Dose to help people understand their prescriptions and issues related to taking medications. When Marijke isn’t writing, you will probably find her in her sewing room, creating beautiful quilts.
Karin Molander is an emergency physician who began her training in 1992 in the windy city of Chicago and completed it in the San Francisco area, where she decided to stay put having survived one too many a blustery day in the midwest. She has worked in the academic and community setting and for a large health maintenance organization. Karin has watched medicine evolve from paper and pen charts, pagers, and men-only physician locker rooms to electronic health records, cell phones with televisits, and to an era where more women enter medicine than men.
Karin has written articles, book chapters, and many a thank-you note. She has presented at the national and local level, provided guest appearances for local television shows, and volunteered for Rock Medicine (attempting to keep concertgoers safe from their own excesses). As the last child leaves the house, to preserve the sanctity of her marriage and embarrass her children for maximal effect, she has decided to start a blog and YouTube channel with her colleague Marijke. She leaves the quilt-making to Marijke and prefers to sew up fingers, toes, and faces as an emergency medicine physician.