Press Contact: Christine Miserandino
ButYouDontLookSick.com
516 343 9322
[email protected]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Public Needs to Be “Spoon Fed”About Those With Invisible Disabilities
Long Island, NY, October 31, 2005 – Christine Miserandino, of ButYouDontLookSick.com, is scheduled to appear on Keeping Kids Healthy, a nationwide syndicated television show airing on channel Thirteen / WNET New York, on November 4th and 5th in the tri-state area.
Although she has been in and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals since the age of fifteen, it was only a few years ago when doctors determined that Christine had the chronic inflammatory disease know as Lupus. The laundry list of symptoms was unfortunately all too familiar to Christine.
A phrase which friends and doctors kept repeating- “But You Don’t Look Sick?,” inspired Christine to create a website, www.butyoudontlooksick.com, in order to inform the public about this disease- which plagues over 16,000 Americans each and every year.
It was on this website that Christine published her “Spoon Theory,” a story that attempts to describe living life with a chronic illness. While eating dinner one day with a friend, Christine was asked what it felt like to be sick. She grabbed some spoons and gave them to her friend, to represent the amount of energy she had in any given day. “I wanted something for her to actually hold. If I was in control of taking away the spoons, then she would know what it felt like to have something else, in this case Lupus, being in control.” It was this theory which grabbed the attention of producers at Keeping Kids Healthy, asking if she would like to appear on their show.
Keeping Kids Healthy, in its fourth national season of syndication, is innovating children’s health television. It’s multiple Emmy award winning public broadcasts are aired to over 60% of United State’s households.
Christine Miserandino is very active in Long Island’s Lupus community, participating in events such as the “Lupus Walk” each and every year, in association with the Lupus Alliance. This year alone Long Island’s chapter raised more than $200,000 to aid those with this disease.
Butyoudontlooksick.com, a website that began as a hobby, has become one of the internet’s fastest growing health related sites, and also serves as a support system for thousands of people across the world living with Lupus as well as other “invisible diseases.” Lupus is incurable and the symptoms are varied, impacting most daily activities. Through proper self-care and early diagnosis, day-to-day living can be as normal as one can get while living with a chronic disease.
Look for this broadcast and check out- butyoudontlooksick.com for more information on Lupus.
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