Clinic Notes, March 24

Here’s my regular Clinic Notes, primarily for practitioners. Focused on practical stuff I see that you can use immediately in-clinic to help improve your practice and get more people well. If you’ve ever wanted someone to just get to the ‘clinical pearl’ quickly and save you time, these posts are for you…

Hardwiring for happiness

Have you come across the work of Dr Rick Hanson yet? I often point patients to him who I think would do well with a programme to change a stressful mindset or negative way of thinking. He does great programmes but I also really like his simple Just One Thing blog posts, which often have a great nugget of wisdom in a nice bite-sized piece. Check him out. I recommend him on my Stress Factsheet. He’s a very kind chap and I find people relate to him and his voice particularly well.

I liked a recent post he did called Give Them What They Want:

Find out what they [a significant person in your life] really want.

Most people want pretty straightforward things: Put the cap back on the toothpaste. Don’t interrupt so much. Ask me questions each day about myself, and pay attention to the answers. Be nice to me. Keep being my lover even while we raise children. Pull your weight with housework. Stick up for me with others. Be interested in how I feel. Most of the time, it’s really not that hard to give someone what they want. It’s more a matter of whether you want to.

Once you have a pretty clear idea about what the person wants, decide for yourself what, if anything, you are going to do. Remember that your wants matter, too, and that you can’t give without also filling yourself up. And remember that giving others what they want is usually a good way to take of yourself.

Personally, it was a great breakthrough to realize that giving others what they wanted was not knuckling under to them. Rather, it was a kind of triple-bonus aikido move that tapped into my caring for people while pulling me out of conflicts and putting me in the best position to ask for what I wanted myself. I redefined situations in which people criticized me into a kind of game in which I unilaterally eliminated the reasonable basis for their complaints, and began to enjoy what’s traditionally called “the bliss of blamelessness.”

Pick something reasonable and just give it to the other person for an hour or a week without saying a word about it, and see what happens. Pick something else and see what happens. When it feels right, talk about what you’re doing. When you like, also talk about your own wants.

You are still taking care of your own needs and not letting people push you around. Instead of getting caught in sticky quarrels, you’re delivering the goods as best you can and moving on.

Rick Hanson Blog

Sleep tips – And which chronotype are you or your patients?

I enjoyed this podcast from Zoe with Prof Matt Walker all about sleep. Didn’t learn too much new, but I liked the overview of his sleep tips from 33′ onwards and there was a good reminder to do the MEQ sleep chronotype questionnaire with patients – are they sleeping according to that or to fit in with work/family commitments? I’ve added the questionnaire link into my patient resources. I found it quite hard to answer the questions myself as I know what my usual sleep pattern answers would be but they’ve all gone to pot with perimenopause! I’m usually a morning person, but now I get much less sleep, I’m knackered most of the time!

Integrative and Personalised Medicine Conference, June 6-8, London

I wish I was closer to go to this for a day – why does no-one ever come to Cornwall??! Looks fascinating. Check it out here, and use the member’s discounted rate PLM-20 code kindly given by Clinical Education. Register before May to get early bird discounts too. Enjoy. Wave to me from there x

Thyroid problems that don’t show up on tests

I know quite a bit about thyroid issues, but I didn’t know some of these hidden types described by Chris Kresser – did you? I tend to think, though, that conversion problems (his number 2) are down to a lack of iodine or selenium, as I explain on my Thyroid factsheet here. Interesting, though. Can anyone give us a heads-up on treatment for this list?

Chronic kidney disease – primary care

I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t taught a fat lot about kidney disease or care when I trained (or not that I can remember anyway, although it was 25 years ago, eek!). I am seeing more and more kidney markers out of whack, though, so I was interested to read this Medscape overview of chronic kidney disease identification and ‘holistic’ care (my italics).

My view with kidneys is pretty much to make sure the pressure is taken off them by ensuring liver, lymph, gut, bile, skin etc, ie. all other elimination processes are working well, and magnesium, of course. I tend to turn to SHS herbal mixes for supporting mild kidney issues if needed, but anything more I’d refer as it’s not my field, as I say. Any other kidney tips welcome, please!

Medscape comments – do read them!

I often get more from the comments under a Medscape article than I do the actual piece itself. Do you read the comments? They give a fascinating insight to how our medics are thinking; some downright scary, others more enlightened. It always makes me think it is a bit of a lottery what kind of care you get from your GP/consultant etc as (like all of us in alternative medicine, I’m sure), there are so many different views and approaches.

This comment piece on cancer and the study that suggests many people believe ‘everything can cause cancer’, thus negating the real need to do anything about it lifestyle and diet-wise was quite fascinating in a weird kind of way. The point was that we need to overcome that clearly strong-held belief and educate people better. But some of the comments underneath were also interesting. Such as:

Some people are born cancerous: they have unfavorable genetics.

Some people achieve cancer: they have lifestyles that favor carcinogenesis. Eg. smoking, chemical and radiation exposure, asbestos, sunbathing, untreated GERD. [I’d add plenty of other factors there, not least diet, hormone-disrupting chemicals, stress etc].

Some people have cancer thrust upon them: they avoid and/or survive the other diseases trying to kill them. At long last, cancer gets its turn.

Medscape

This strikes me as a good explanation for patients who believe they have brought cancer on themselves in some way or that they can ‘fight’ cancer, when clearly some people, very sadly, can’t. Shit sometimes happens, and all we can do is educate the risks and prevention tactics and ensure an optimal immune system.