The Patient Experience

The earliest recorded smoking ban dates from 1575 when a Mexican church council banned smoking in Churches.

However the modern movement for stopping smoking in public places started with the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act which started to limit places where people could smoke.  This process was speeded up in 1998 when California banned smoking in pretty much all work place including bars and restaurants.  Since then many US states and other countries have followed suit.  In the UK all workplace smoking has been banned since July 2007.

The following video is from the Arkansas’s “Lets Clear the Air Campaign” where Kate Moran tells us why she supports a ban on smoking. Click here for more

Actually there are two types of medical tattoos. One use of tattoo is to help cover up damage which has been caused by either medical conditions or treatments. Typically these can be scar camouflage or colouring of burns to make them blend in with the rest of the skin.

However while of interest these are not the main focus of this discussion blog.

We are interested in medical tattoos which are decorative to some degree and hope to achieve one of the two following objectives. Click here for more

A quick search of Google for “rude doctors” brings up some pretty worrying results. There does generally seem to be a view that physicians and other healthcare professional are not as courteous as perhaps we would like.

Indeed the Mumbai based physician blogger Dr Aniruddha Malpani remarks “One of the commonest complaints patients have about their doctors is that they are impolite or rude. I feel this is especially true for doctors who have a hospital-based practise. Hospitals tend to breed rude behaviour. Even polite doctors tend to become arrogant once they have spent a few years in a hospital.” (Dr Malpani’s blog is well worth checking out by the way. Click here for more

It should be remembered that jet lag is, in fact, a medical condition.  Formally called desynchronosis, it refers to the condition which is created by changs to the body’s circadian rhythms which are the product of long distance travel between different time zones.

Thus flying say between Cape Town and London while a long flight will not typically result in jet lag.  On the other hand flying say between Los Angles and Moscow will cause jet lag.   Flying across a couple of different time zones is very unlikely to cause jet lag. When we change times zones our bodies’ functions such as sleep and times of feeling hungry become out of synchronisation with both the time of our departure country and that one the country of arrival. Click here for more

Circadian rhythms, an afternoon nap, morning fatigue these are all common topics of discussion of people with a wide variety of medical conditions.

The purpose of this blog is to widen the discussion that has started particularly on our multiple sclerosis face book when our members started discussion both fatigue and the times of day when they felt their best and their worst.

Typically we found that this was often related to fatigue. And indeed initiated being discussed by our various communities such as RA and Diabetes. Click here for more