A 33yo Female presents with severe long-standing diarrhoea, weight loss, fatigue and generalised musculoskeletal pain. Initially without a medical diagnosis, however she’s been told by an ‘integrative practitioner’ that unusual African parasites were the cause of her sickness and then subsequently independently diagnosed with Giardia which was treated with Flagyl. By the time she returns some 6 months later for her next appointment, she’s now got an official medical diagnosis of Myositis, which is producing crippling pain requiring hospitalisation at times and is not relieved by standard pain meds. While the acute diarrhoea is less of an issue now there are still significant GIT problems in spite of a restricted diet and when we zoom out to take in the whole case there is still a significant dysbiotic, immune story of repeat UTIs, thrush and her white cells counts bounce from high to low. Doctors have now switched her from steroids to methotrexate to try and address her myositis at least.
Now before you all run screaming from the room…let’s just stop for a minute and ask ourselves a couple of ALWAYS IMPORTANT QUESTIONS:
- Is there a beneficial role that I can play for this client? i.e. is there anyone else taking a whole systems approach to her health
- While I may not KNOW what is going on exactly and precisely WHY – are there enough clues to point to the systems that need support, processes that seem aberrant that I could put back on track etc.
So if you can answer yes to both of these then you can stop holding your breath, calmly ask the client to take a seat and let the detective work begin…
This is the case we’re covering in group mentoring this coming Monday 14th Sept at 3.30pm AEST. Together with a group of practitoners all live via Skype we’ll do the detective work together and try to come up with some sensible next steps in terms of both treatment and any necessary further investigation. Everyone is welcome and if you can’t attend the session live but want to hear the case, you can book in online and we’ll supply you with a recording. It’s a great case – with many aspects common presentations in clinic so it has huge relevance to any practitioner.
If you’re keen you can book into this session here newbies, oldies & in-betweenies welcomed with open arms 🙂