Lori Nelson is a board-certified physical medicine and rehabilitation physician with fellowship training in interventional spine and pain medicine. She currently works in California and is the founder and author of The Bedside Advocate, a patient and caregiver education initiative focused on health care navigation, advocacy, and preparedness.
She founded The Bedside Advocate following the death of her father after a missed intracerebral hemorrhage, with the goal of helping patients and families navigate complex health care systems before a crisis occurs. Through practical tools such as The Know Me File and the We Got This Challenge, she teaches health care preparedness, communication, and self-advocacy.
She is also the author of "The Stroke They Never Saw," an essay examining diagnostic error, family advocacy, and lessons learned from navigating a devastating medical event. Additional essays and educational content are available on her Substack.
“Eighty-six-year-old man dies of a stroke.”
It is the kind of sentence medicine writes cleanly, almost mercifully, as though a life can be folded into a diagnosis and quietly filed away. I have read sentences like that in charts, discharge summaries, death certificates. But this time, the man was my father.
His name was Herbert Nelson. Herb. Herbie. Brother Nelson. Elder Nelson. Mr. Nelson. Daddy.
He did not die alone in some forgotten …
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Anchoring bias killed my father inside a stroke center
