In Mye Own Words

Myeloma is a rare blood cancer. Almost 6,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with it each year, yet the majority have waited a number of years for that diagnosis. The key barrier is language. GPs use medicalised terms for symptoms, such as ‘chronic fatigue’ or ‘peripheral neuropathy (numbness)’, when patients would describe it as feeling like ‘a toy that had run out of battery’ or ‘being plugged into the mains’. This miscommunication results in many appointments failing to test for myeloma.

Myeloma UK need both the public to ask to be tested, and GPs to be on the lookout for it sooner. ‘In Mye Own Words’ is a symptom awareness campaign that puts real patients’ descriptions in the spotlight, reaching the public in a language they understand. MHP worked with people who live with myeloma to understand how it actually feels and captured their colourful descriptions in eye-catching illustrated headlines and brave recorded interviews. Each patient’s story was turned into powerful social media posts that ran during Myeloma Awareness Week. The posts prompted the medical and public audiences to download a ‘symptom translator’ that allowed patients to translate the terminology based on the feeling, and healthcare professionals to ‘decode’ the descriptions from patients. The bold creative had massive stand out and has resulted in over 250k+ unique views, an uplift of 380% of visits to the MyelomaUK site (over 50% being new visitors) and most crucially GP surgeries making the symptom translator an official resource for healthcare professionals.