Meet Stephanie Van

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Stephanie Van a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Stephanie, so excited to talk about all sorts of important topics with you today. The first one we want to jump into is about being the only one in the room – for some that’s being the only person of color or the only non-native English speaker or the only non-MBA, etc Can you talk to us about how you have managed to be successful even when you were the only one in the room that looked like you?

Working in healthcare, I still often find myself being the only person in the room who is keenly aware of and adamantly passionate about disability advocacy and justice. The disability rights movement has been growing steadily since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, but even with a surge in support for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiatives, disability advocacy still gets neglected, even though it is a common human experience that results in marginalization. It can be extremely frustrating to feel like you’re the only one who cares about something, who recognizes its importance, or who is working towards something that is undervalued by everyone else around you. But I always remind myself about how I was once new to disability advocacy. To me, being successful and effective in advocacy, healthcare, and professional spaces means making connections and helping people understand and appreciate the things you value in your work. So, even when my passion for disability advocacy is met with indifference, curiosity, or even resistance, I always adapt a welcoming attitude and remind myself that I could be giving another person the opportunity to experience a potentially life-long passion for the first time.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I’m a physician who trained in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation who now is double board certified and specializes in interventional pain management. I’m also an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

In 2020, as I was finishing my fellowship training in Pain Medicine, I was shocked at how many patients were so grateful that I listened to them attentively and validated the experience of their symptoms. Isn’t that what doctors are supposed to do? Apparently it wasn’t as common as I thought.

The longer I’ve worked in healthcare, the more I’ve realized that the patient experience (at least in the U.S.) is far from ideal, and many people who seek care feel dismissed or downright mistreated by their doctors. This particularly affects people with apparent disabilities, who only recently were recognized by the NIH as a marginalized health population in 2023. This type of discrimination is known as ableism, and it is unfortunately pervasive throughout our healthcare system and culture.

So, during my first year as an attending physician, amidst a global pandemic, I teamed up with my friend AJ, who was born with Cerebral Palsy and uses a wheelchair, and we started a YouTube channel (called This Ability Clinic) dedicated to disability-conscious healthcare education. Hosting and producing content for our YouTube channel helps to educate myself and others like me who want to do better for our patients and for people in general.

On This Ability Clinic, we interview people with disabilities, breakdown movies and TV shows that represent disability, and post more formal educational lectures that are used in the training of future medical professionals. Healthcare has a lot to learn from the people it’s supposed to be helping, and it deserves a taste of its own medicine. By educating providers about ableism, This Ability Clinic encourages and models accountability amongst healthcare providers to offer an inclusive experience for every person. By analyzing representations of disability in media and highlighting the authentic stories of real people with disabilities, we’re helping to make the disabled experience more accessible to those who otherwise are less familiar with and may be otherwise fearful of disability.

This Ability Clinic is special because there are not enough healthcare providers even aware of the problem of ableism or motivated to do anything about it. I would be so honored if more people checked out This Ability Clinic on YouTube (and TikTok, and Instagram) and shared it with their friends, family, and healthcare teams!

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

The qualities and skills that help me the most are a love of lifelong learning, an openness to learn about other peoples’ experiences without judgment, and having a graceful tendency to always take the high road, even if I’m met with ignorance or even aggression. I never regret being kind, understanding, empathetic, or, when an interaction doesn’t serve to benefit the disability advocacy movement, I never regret simply disengaging.

The best way to learn about supporting the disability community is from the people within the disability community. Being respectful, staying curious, asking questions, appreciating differences, and projecting the goal of learning and understanding go a long way in the disability advocacy space. As my friend and mentor Jim LeBrecht (co-director of “Crip Camp” likes to say, the beautiful thing about disability is that it intersects with every other marginalized human experience.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

I am always excited to connect with other people, whether they’ve been in the disability advocacy space for a long time, or are very new to the movement. I’ve had the privilege of connecting with everyday people as well as people in the healthcare and entertainment industries for interviews and breakdowns on This Ability Clinic. I would be thrilled to collaborate with anyone with lived experience of disability and/or people working in entertainment, healthcare and/or medical education, since disability-conscious education is severely lacking in these spaces but is crucial to confronting ableism in our culture and in the training of the next generation of healthcare professionals.

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