We are thrilled to share with you that Jaime Seltzer, #MEAction’s Scientific Director, has been selected for TIME100 Health 2024, TIME’s new annual list of 100 individuals who most influenced global health this year! This is a huge honor based on years of work fighting for equity for people with ME.
We intimately know the work that Jaime, powered by your support for #MEAction, has been doing to earn this incredible honor. We will walk you through some of that work below but first we want to say thank you to the community that has enabled this work and ask you to join us in congratulating Jaime Seltzer but also join us in celebrating the win this is for our whole community. We are on the cusp of so many change-making projects but we can only do them with your support, so please donate today so we can build on this win together.
Brief Overview of Jaime’s Accomplishments
Jaime contracted ME in 2014 and, like many, struggled to get a diagnosis. Despite having a family history of ME, she still sought care in multiple hospital systems before her first episode of PEM led her to the ME community, and an expert clinician. She then became one of #MEAction’s first hires as Managing Editor, and helped plan the first MillionsMissing protests.
Jaime then worked at the Stanford Genome Technology Center (SGTC) at Stanford University under Dr. Ron Davis, whose son, Whitney, has severe ME. Then, she returned to #MEAction in the position of Director of Scientific and Medical Outreach, now Scientific Director.
Jaime has created and spearheaded multiple research and medical education initiatives, including the Unrest CME, the Postcards to Doctors initiative, the Research Review, the Chronic Illness Survey Adventure, the work with Mayo Clinic Rochester clinicians funded by the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine, and has managed relationships with institutions engaging in more in-depth partnerships during this year’s #TeachMETreat ME initiative for #MillionsMissing.
Jaime was one of the first to discuss– in public and internally– the magnitude of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. She guided the development of #MEAction’s COVID Disinformation Guide, Hospitalization Kit, and the Pacing Guide, a layperson’s guide to symptom-contingent activity management after COVID, in early 2020. She subsequently developed the Pediatric Pacing Guide in partnership with Long COVID Families, and the Clinician’s Pacing Guide in association with the Patient-Led Research Collaborative (PLRC).
She was also a strong and deliberate voice on Twitter (now X), where she shared information about infection-associated chronic illnesses and her personal experience living with ME, POTS, and hEDS. Over the course of the pandemic, she was interviewed by multiple publications with the help of Adriane Tillman, including TIME, Rolling Stone, NPR, The Atlantic, Reuters, Vox, The Washington Post, Popular Science, STAT News, WebMD, Infection Control Today, The International Business Times, Mashable, and others.
In her position at #MEAction, she has worked with WHO, CDC, NIH and other national and international government organizations as a subject-matter expert with lived experience.
She has continued to work with the SGTC and the Snyder Lab and, as part of her #MEAction work and as a consultant with multiple Long COVID researchers and clinicians, she has helped incorporate the community’s wisdom about ME into the future of research and clinical care. Many of these relationships have led to longer-term partnerships in medical education work this #MillionsMissing.
“Being on the TIME100 Health list of honorees is hard to take in– and it’s an honor that would have been hard to even picture just a few years ago.I owe a great deal to our tenacious, brilliant community, who taught me how to look after myself when no one else could– and to #MEAction, which has been my home. When I speak online, in the news, and in a research group, I’m not just conveying my opinions, attitudes and ideas, but listening to the words of the community and doing my best to ensure we are all heard. I have been able to do this work through your support of #MEAction and your support is needed to keep it going."
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