Beyond the Wheeze was created to help bridge the gap between lived experience and better respiratory care.
What began as a podcast has grown into a broader platform focused on advocacy, education, storytelling, and meaningful healthcare conversations.
Through podcast episodes, speaking engagements, workshops, articles, and community-driven initiatives, Beyond the Wheeze brings together patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, and organizations working to improve life with asthma and other chronic respiratory conditions.
The goal is simple: create more informed, human-centered respiratory care by ensuring patient voices are not only heard, but meaningfully included.
For many people living with respiratory disease, healthcare is not only clinical. It is personal, emotional, exhausting, and deeply human.
Beyond the Wheeze exists to help create conversations that better reflect that reality. By combining lived experience with expert insight, the platform works to help make respiratory care more connected, collaborative, and accessible.
The platform focuses on:
Meaningful healthcare improvement starts with including patients as active partners in conversations, planning, and decision-making. Beyond the Wheeze works to help organizations move beyond tokenism toward more authentic patient involvement.
Access to clear, practical, and relatable education can help people better understand and manage respiratory disease. Beyond the Wheeze shares conversations and resources designed to make respiratory health information more approachable and human.
Advocacy begins with helping people feel seen, heard, and understood. Beyond the Wheeze works to raise awareness around the realities of living with asthma and other chronic respiratory conditions, while helping elevate patient voices in healthcare conversations.
Lived experience offers insight that clinical knowledge alone cannot provide. Beyond the Wheeze believes patient perspectives can help shape more informed, compassionate, and effective respiratory care.
Strong communication can improve trust, understanding, and health outcomes. Beyond the Wheeze encourages more open and collaborative conversations between patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals.
Stories have the power to connect people, reduce stigma, and create understanding. Through conversation and shared experiences, Beyond the Wheeze helps build a stronger sense of community within respiratory health.
Josh Rheaume is the founder and host of Beyond the Wheeze, as well as an asthma advocate, speaker, and patient voice in respiratory healthcare. Living with severe asthma since birth, Josh spent much of his life navigating the challenges that come with chronic respiratory disease, including frequent hospitalizations, limitations, and the emotional impact of living with a condition many people do not fully understand.
Over time, he transformed those experiences into advocacy, using storytelling and lived experience to help improve awareness, communication, and patient engagement in healthcare spaces. Through podcast conversations, public speaking, workshops, and advocacy initiatives, Josh works to help bridge the gap between healthcare systems and the people living within them.
Today, Josh collaborates with healthcare organizations, advocacy groups, clinicians, researchers, and community initiatives to help bring the patient perspective into conversations around respiratory care. His work has included collaborations and conversations connected to organizations such as Asthma Canada, the Lung Health Foundation, SickKids, and others across the respiratory health community.
Beyond the Wheeze continues to grow as a platform for conversation, education, advocacy, and collaboration in respiratory health.
The long-term vision is to build programs, resources, and initiatives that help improve support, awareness, and patient inclusion across the respiratory healthcare landscape.
As the platform evolves, the mission remains the same:
To help people living with respiratory disease feel heard, understood, represented, and supported.
Whether through podcast collaboration, speaking engagements, workshops, advocacy initiatives, or educational opportunities, Beyond the Wheeze works with organizations looking to create more informed, human-centered respiratory care.
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