Blogging backlog

I'm actually back in London now but I have a backlog of blogging to do so here goes.

Things I saw in the hospital since my last blog.............there was a woman who came in with burns on her left arm and leg after being caught in a gas explosion. She came to have the burns cleaned, some cream put on them and then have them bandaged. She actually seemed quite calm about the whole thing seeing as she'd just been involved in quite a nasty accident.

After shadowing in the paediatrics department I went to shadow in the physiotherapy department. It was an area of medicine thats quite different to the other areas i've seen as it involves the use of things like waves and hot wax. The wax treatment i'm referring to was used on a woman who'd been involved in a car crash. She'd dislocated her shoulder and broken her wrist. Both injuries had healed but her shoulders had become stiff due to her muscles having not been used in a long time. So the hot wax was put on her shoulder. Heat relaxes the muscles and so reduced the pain the woman was feeling. Then, while the muscles were still more relaxed, the physiotherapist moved the womans arms repeatedly in a certain way, loosening the shoulder. Even though the wax had relaxed the muscles you could still see the woman was in a lot of pain. Poor woman, there was still quite a few more appointments to go.

Another treatment used by the physiotherapist was waves. A machine was used to produce waves of a specific frequency, decided on by the physiotherapist. They were used to get rid of some pain in another patients leg as they, like the wax, had the affect of relaxing the muscles. This patient had had a fall and, although she didn't break anything, she had developed pain in the leg. Her treatment was to go on for 3 consecutive days. This was a common feature of physiotherapy, the treatments tended to happen over a period of time with the physiotherapist having to make appointments with the patient. So, apart from this one man in the treatment room who kept coming in to have his diabetic ulcer cleaned, it was the first time I was seeing a patient more than once. Its a weird thing seeing a patient more than once, makes you feel like you've been in the hospital for ages.

A third patient in the physiotherapy department was a boy who'd sprained his ankle in a football injury. He had pain in the soles of his feet and so was having ultrasound administered there. The ultrasound was supposed to reduce inflammation.

I found the treatments used in physiotherapy to be quite weird, mainly because they weren't tangible things. In some ways I felt untrusting of it, almost like it was some sort of traditional medicine relying purely on peoples' belief in it but not actually proven to work. But I know it is a proven treatment and this was proven by the people I saw whos joints got less stiff and painful over the time I saw them.