What can I do to help myself?

A common theme I will spend more time with later in this curriculum. An overview would include:

1 Avoid harmful habits:

Toxic habits such as smoking, excess alcohol, lack of consistent, intelligent exercise, stress and malnutrition.

Not creating and following a "medical calendar" including dental, eye, and basic medical monitoring checks.

Not responding to any changes in your body that might be early warning signs of illness.

2 Build healthy habits:

Establish health goals embracing the above issues

Develop a comfortable and honest relationship with an healthcare provider you have rapport with

Do a yearly "SWOT" analysis [ strength, weakness, opportunities and threats ] - more about this later

Monday January 11.

As I look back on todays intraction with patients, two basic questions emerge as "foundation" elements in constructing and educating about a management plan which I call a map.

1 What do I have and what is going to happen to me?
2 What can I do to help myself?

Over the next few weeks I will build a map and navigate through the options to illustrate the basic information needed to understand and deal with their cancer.

Each disease has unique elements as add-ons to this process and later I will be using video on U-TUBE or imbedded in this blog to illustrate. The patient ends our first meeting with a few pages in which are sketched out their disease facts and management plan covering:

1 What do I have?
2 Where is it?
3 What does this mean to my life?
4 What are my treatment options?
5 What can I do to help myself?

We will discuss each element as build a map for different cancer using my daily patient consultations as examples.

It is the night before "day one" of this experience driven blog. By some count there are 10,000 plus health, medical blogs. I want to bring something practical to this offering for patients and anyone interested in navigating through encounters with the diagnosis of cancer. I am driven by daily encounters with people struggling to cope with a new diagnosis. Chaos, uncertainty, fear are natural responses when the orbit we live in is challenged by a life threatening disease.

Knowledge and the control that it brings is a gyroscope that allows the best pathway through a complicated map. I hope to bring a compass, and a "best fit" practice guide. I do this every working day.