Newsletter 3

To get the most out of your membership, it’s a good idea to write down questions when you think of them, and post them here in the Graduate Support Forum. That will help me enormously, otherwise I’m trying to guess what your needs are!

Tina, you were going to post some questions here about how to answer some questions from friends and family, but you were feeling poorly. I do hope you’re feeling better and life is getting back on track. Do you feel up to posting your questions yet?

It would be best to create a new topic for each question. That makes them easier to find.

In this newsletter I’m going to write about one of the things I have found most helpful over the years: TV.

The TV is a very useful source of medical knowledge, provided in an interesting and entertaining way. I have learned so much from TV programs. I’d really like to encourage you all to try some out.

The best ones are not in the mainstream channels, but on reality channels like Freeview Quest Red, CBS Reality, Really and sometimes Pick. The ones I watch whenever they come up (and they are usually repeated several times) are:
Something’s Killing Me: A series about very rare diseases such as rabies, and how they do their damage.
Dr G Medical Examiner: A pathologist who comments on autopsies as she performs them. The autopsies are not shown on screen, but there are reconstructions of the events leading up to the person’s death. These programs provide extremely educational explanations of what happens in a heart attack, how alcohol and cocaine, etc, cause their damage, how infections kill, etc, etc.
Dr Pimple Popper, The Bad Skin Clinc, Dr Mercy, Skin A&E: These are all programs about dermatology. They explain interesting skin diseases and show them being treated, often with surgery.
Body Bizarre: this is mostly about genetic diseases
Botched: This is a very popular and entertaining series about plastic surgery.

Programs like this can enlighten you in entirely unexpected ways. I watched one on surgery in one of Britain’s top hospitals, where surgeons were trying to remove blood clots from the arteries feeding the lungs. Having previously held fond ideas that nutrition (fish oil, vitamin E etc) could maybe help dissolve blood clots or dilate the blood vessels enough for them to dislodge, I was shocked to see that blood clots do not look anything like we imagine them. A blood clot choking a lung artery can be a couple of inches long, whitish and fibrous, and there can be so many, that the patient can die if they are not removed, manually, one by one.

This is why I always say: Start with the basics. Start with the most obvious, based on the client’s diet and page 2 of their questionnaire. Explain to the client that once you have fixed the basics, often the bigger issues will start to heal themselves.

Your client will be most concerned about their medical diagnosis. That’s all they know. Your job is not to give them a magic solution, so don’t even try. Your job is to be a teacher; to start educating them as to how their health went wrong. The extensive knowledge provided in your course is for you to explain everything you ask clients to do. That helps compliance.

As soon as I’m able to release the Client Report Template, you will find that it guides you through this process.

Of course you should look up the client’s medical diagnosis and read up everything you can find about it.

Hoping this is helpful
Linda