Interesting stuff I think might help us get even more people well. Enjoy x
Hi peeps, here’s your monthly Clinic Notes for practitioners. Emails go out to all subscribers, but if you don’t want to receive this publication, all you need to do is go to www.substack.com/settings, click on your Purehealth by Micki Rose subscription and toggle sections on and off, depending on what you want to receive or not.
Here’s goes – hope you find something useful.
I see this new headache and migraine Kharrazian course is coming up – as a (former, yay!!!!) migraine sufferer myself, this is an important area to learn about. I did all the usual things – magnesium, B vits, food elimination, osteopathy etc etc, and nothing much would help. Turned out much of it was hormonal and insulin resistance, with TMJ involvement, I think – I’m still not overly certain what stopped them but it did coincide with the menopause.
I would sincerely not wish it on my worst enemy – I think last time I looked WHO classed it as one of the top most disabling conditions. I get that, truly. I had to give up my face to face clinic for almost 15 years and a lot of food and life just to cope at one point. They lasted 5-6 days and I had 3 a month. God, the memory is enough to make me feel sick!
I just looked up the WHO factsheet on headaches and migraine. This statement is truly shocking:
Worldwide, only a minority of people with headache disorders are appropriately diagnosed and treated by a health care provider.
Headache has been underestimated, under-recognized and under-treated throughout the world.
Headache disorders impose a burden on individuals that can include substantial personal suffering, impaired quality of life and financial cost. Repeated headache attacks, and often the constant fear of the next one, damage family life, social life and employment. The long-term effort of coping with a chronic headache disorder may also predispose the individual to other illnesses. For example, anxiety and depression are significantly more common in people who experience migraines than in healthy individuals.
I’ll say!
Anyway, this is one course I will be doing. If we can help people with this horrid condition, we really should. Early bird pricing of $395 until 19th May. Register and more info here.
Does anyone reading specialise in headaches and migraine at all? Do let us know. I don’t know anyone, do you?
Nice reminder here from Precision Point about the P88 food sensitivity test. It’s the one I use most often, alongside Cyrex 3 and 4 mostly. What are your favourite sensitivity tests?
I must admit, nowadays, I really only test for gluten and cross-reactives, and concentrate much more on the reasons for a loss of oral tolerance if many foods come up. If they do, I do a GI360 to look at the stool chemistry mainly – SCFA, butyrate, SIgA and elastase levels, especially. Then correct whatever is found there and do some repair for a probable leaky gut. I no longer do classic elimination diets and discourage them if I can.
This just goes to show why we should never give up on an older person – they deserve treatment as much as any other person. Great case study.
I see the fabulous NatMed Pro database is having a revamp. They are doing a 45 min demo love on Wednesday, April 30, 2025 at 2pm EST. I think that’s 7pm UK time but I’m always useless at working out the timings. No matter, I’m sure if you register and can’t do it live, they will send it out to you.
I love the work of Dr Bruce Hoffman, especially his work on MCAS and chronic illness. So, I was delighted to see that he did a great webinar for practitioners recently to go over his sort of model of care for chronic illness patients. He says he wants to pass on his legacy knowledge as he is getting older – which is a bit how I feel, although he is quite a bit older than me, so maybe I am peaking too soon!
It looks to be based on the seven stages of healing – layers/bodies model – I wrote about that in my own Healing Plan and used a lot of the knowledge of the various ‘bodies’ and layers to help my own chronic illness. I think if you are a practitioner who wants to do more than ‘just’ biochemical/functional medicine and want to find a model that covers spirituality, emotions, soul etc too, then this would be a good fit.
It costs around $3000 from what I can see, and there are early bird discounts of 20%. So, not cheap, but an immense amount of experience being given here, if you need a model of healing to hang your practice on. I would say, from my own clinical experience, I found a good few years ago now that you really need to address both biochemistry and mind-body medicine to get people well, so this resonates with me. I also added vagus and brain neuroplasticity techniques, too. Cos I’m comprehensive like that 😉
Introduction to the 7 stages Webinar
In this webinar, Dr. Bruce Hoffman, M.D., MSc, FAARFM, IFMCP, presents his 7 Stages to Health and Transformation Model – his structured diagnostic and treatment approach for treating complex chronic illness.
This webinar will explore Dr. Hoffman’s comprehensive framework along with key concepts in mitochondrial heteroplasmy, cell danger response, and cell membrane medicine.
Learn more here: https://www.drbrucehoffman.com/7-stages/landing
I think even just watching the intro video will give you a lot to work on and think about for practice.
Talking of mental and emotional health, see this from Chris Kresser’s newsletter – and I went into a rant about social media underneath it, sorry!:
Blocking internet on smartphones more effective than antidepressants
A landmark randomized controlled trial published in PNAS Nexus found that blocking mobile internet on smartphones for just two weeks can significantly improve mental health, subjective well-being, and the ability to sustain attention. The study used a smartphone application to block mobile internet access while still allowing calls and texts, as well as internet access through other devices such as computers. The improvements in mental health were substantial – the effect on depression symptoms was larger than the meta-analytic effect of antidepressants and similar to that of cognitive behavioral therapy. The change in objectively measured sustained attention ability was comparable to reversing about ten years of age-related decline. What explained these remarkable benefits? When participants didn’t have constant access to mobile internet, they spent more time socializing in person, exercising, and being in nature. These findings provide compelling evidence that our constant connection to the online world may come at a significant cost to our cognitive functioning and emotional well-being, and suggest that digital minimalism could be a powerful approach for improving mental health.
I can really relate to that. I don’t know about you but I am starting to feel a pull away from the virtual world – personally and professionally – and a return to physical IRL stuff. I am buying actual journals and magazines more, have an urge to teach and see patients more face to face and have really had enough of social media. I switched to Substack to do my newsletters and read long form pieces on here, but I really want to write and read a proper newspaper, you know. Is that my age, or are you feeling it too? I am usually ahead of these things, being a bit of a ‘canary in the coalmine’ type person.
I’m also railing against Meta/Facebook scraping – stealing, let’s say it as it is – writers’ articles and books to teach AI, so that AI can then reproduce similar things based on our hard work! I am so mad about that. I also don’t like the giving up of diversity and equality policies to suit Trump, or the millions donated to Trump’s campaign and inauguration ceremony. Sos, off on a rant there, but come on! I don’t want anything to do with them anymore. Meta own Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, in case you didn’t know.
Twitter-X is a complete no-go area since Musk took it over. I’m trying BlueSky, but find it a bit meh. Do you use it?
I like You Tube but I’m also naffed off with Google, who own that. Mainly for putting in updates that devalue natural health websites like mine – traffic has tanked – and favouring mainstream health sites massively, alongside Reddit and Quora, which is full of poor and wrong health information. Just: why?!
Ha, I sound like a conspiracy theorist! I assure you I’m not. Just aware. And not sure how long I can go on ignoring the pull away, you know. I think I’ll stick with my own blog, Substack and Pinterest for now! I don’t have any problems with those. Yet.
Tell me what your thoughts are on all this – what do you choose to do? Are you in hock to social media for your business? Are you still enjoying it?
Need research resources? Try these – and let us know any others you use a lot:
NICE Evidence Services are a suite of services that provide access to high quality authoritative evidence and best practice. Complementary therapies are included and can be searched for using helpful filters.
The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews has a wealth of evidence that can be searched for specific complementary therapies.
PubMed is a free search engine that provides access to a huge database of references and research abstracts, including those relevant to specific complementary therapies.
Individual research journals that provide open access to articles include:
That’s it for this issue, folks!
Don’t forget to check out the Purehealth News I do weekly-ish too for lots of other stuff I witter on about. You’ll find the archive here, but sign up to get them as I write them. And you can see my regular titbit type of Notes here.
This issue contains a useful bit about what markers are supposedly ‘normal’ on bloods and my thoughts on why they are probably not!