Today was another great day. Too many patients to count but a ton of fun. The day started off with supervising a diabetic club meeting. This entailed supervising students taking cases and performing physical exams on diabetic patients. I came up with many different medical plans both for integrative care and allopathic care. We had some really tough (sad) cases today but overall I feel that all patients who came to this club today received help.
After the diabetic club I took two students (one PA and one ND) with me on a house visit. This was unplanned but the patient couldn’t make it to the diabetic club today due to complications of her illness. So we took a local taxi to her house and took the case, preformed acupuncture, increased her Rx medications, prescribed some naturopathic medicines, and provided lifestyle counseling. This one visit turned into three and so we were there until about 11:15. We then took a taxi back to the clinic and continued to see more patients from the diabetic club.
After a great lunch from a local restaurant we headed back to the clinic for a normal general medicine clinic. We helped so many people today within a short amount of time. In one of these cases I recommended and treated a patient with pain in her left arm and neck. I preformed some naturopathic manipulations on her and she stated on and on to the students and translators that she never felt so well. She said that she did receive medicine for this pain from her local doctor a few months back that worked really well for a week but then came back. She lost all hope that she would never know what it meant to be pain free again. This was until after out NMT treatment. Made me smile.
I love being able to walk into a patient’s house or or an exam room with next to nothing and being able to treat/heal/cure with the tools available to me. It truly makes you remember one of the naturopathic principles–the healing power of nature. If you give the body what it needs, take out the trash, and increase vitality you truly know that you have helped some one. This is what we did all day today.
I also had the opportunity to teach some PA students how to do thoracic adjustments today. Some of them were so good at this that I asked them to preform this on patients today along with the CEO of Naturopathic Medicine For Global Health. My hope is that this little tool they are learning here this week will be able to help them in their own careers. When they preform a complete diffiencial diagnosis on chest pain and rule out all other complaints I hope they remember that one day in beautiful Guatemala where they learned that a rib/thoracic adjustment can make all the difference to alleviate chest pain in someone who is “normal and healthy” in the allopathic mind.
