outline
These pages display some of Sharon's writings about arthritis, her experience of arthritis, presentations for conferences, and her articles in the magazine "Arthritis News" for which she writes a regular column. The EULAR Conference takes place in a different European country each year and Sharon has given 2 papers. In every second conference, a prize is awarded for the best essay on a subject selected by the Social Leagues standing Committee of EULAR to honour the memory of Edgar Stene and Sharon has entered twice and each time, her essay was selected as the UK entry.
Stene Prize submissions
information technology
1998 How do you expect modern information technology to be of any use to rheumatic patients in the future? Sharon identifies four main causes of a restricted lifestyle: pain; loss of mobility; fatigue and depression and isolation and identifies two major ways technology can help: providing access to information and enabling communication with other people.
coping with fatigue
2005 How do you cope with the fatigue and tiredness of arthritis/rheumatism? Sharon writes about feeling completely exhausted in her first years of arthritis and in her second, now prolonged episode. She argues for support to manage tiredness rather than simply cope, since living with it is the goal and tiredness is part of the lived experience of arthritis. A new lifestyle emerges using limited energies on priorities in life and creating new customs in the household and for social life.
EULAR Conferences
illness narrative - on the route to wellness
Sharon was an Honorary Research Fellow in the Duke of Cornwall Rheumatology Unit at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro studying for a Ph.D. at the University of Surrey when she wrote this paper. Her research project aimed to discover what living well with arthritis means so that wellness can be attained, maintained and improved. Sharon wanted to draw out the experiences of people with arthritis and demonstrate the potential of the "illness narrative" a therapeutic as well as a research tool. Sharon also aimed to use a co-operative inquiry in the later stages. Sharon has her own ideas on what living well with arthritis might mean in practice and how people might achieve it.
treatment is not enough: giving the body back
In 2002, at the EULAR Conference in Nice, Sharon offered a poster presentation inviting health care professionals to give patients their body back. A life long disease, needs to be seen as part of the person and their lives and calls for a partnership to emerge, where the person and the disease are reunited, supported by the health care professional. This calls for an enabling role which focuses on a life long progression towards "regaining wellness" in a "lived body" thus giving the body back to the individual in a new kind of relationship both for the person with their disease and with their health care professional with strong implications for professional skills development.
arthritis news column
From 2000, Sharon wrote a column for the magazine "Arthritis News". We have collected as many of the articles as we can find in each year in the following pages: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004-5, 2006-7 and 2008-9.
patient's network
An article by Sharon Kilty in The Patient's Network magazine, Winter 2000 entitled "Telling the illness story". This is an amended version of the paper for Eular 2000.
