Cure Hiccups / Hiccoughs

Very occasionally patients come in with this strange one. All the patients I have seen in General Practice share one common item in their history - they never learnt a good way to stop hiccups.

From the reading it involves some sort of resetting of the diaphragm that's going beserk.

Click on this website for an interesting read on how you can easily teach someone to cure hiccups and try it at home.

 http://www.hiccupcurenow.com/

Wedge resection of toenail

This will be a revision video for our resection later today. We tend to use a twisting motion to dislodge the nail's lateral edge and you will be surprised by how much nail is embedded. This procedure is so important to result in final resolution of effectively a foreign body. Enjoy.

Another Achievable Diet / Weight loss plan

I do believe the more ways that you can introduce to patients, the better the chance they will find something that suits them.

He does have some good pointers to keeping a habit. Learning by humiliation seems familiar.... What an interesting talk!

How to Inject Steroids for Trigger Finger TUTORIAL

One for my trainees in General Practice

Easy to do, 

Use an orange needle. Always use local anaesthetic. 

In my opinion, target the nodule and you can feel the nodule disperse very often. get the to bend it while the needle is in to ensure you have just the right point.

Often once the nodule disperses, results can be immediate.

I would only do it twice at most and refer on to Hand surgeons.

Could we teach our patients to make themselves happy?

Talking Therapies

Having attended some Medical NLP training with the Society of Medical NLP, it made me look deeper into Hypnosis - in particular the almost mythical Milton H Erickson who its worth following the link to read about.

It seems a lot of everything we do in medicine is getting that 'link' with them and honing our communication skills to that.

Also, there is the use of 'metaphor' for learning, and how this bypasses unconscious defenses against learning new skills.

With regards to CBT or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which seems to be a fancy term for - self help involves homework and you should know that everything is connected - how you feel and how you act.

Useful resources are the Five Areas approach

or the Living Life to the Full website

There is also something strange called mindfulness CBT or MCBT. This is actually all about Meditation and the results are overwhelming! Who would have thought all the Eastern approaches that have been going on for so many years actually worked! I wonder how they have survived so many thousands of years? Yes, I am being sarcastic!

A resource here with the MP3s by Prof Williams at http://franticworld.com/ are worth listening to as to why it works.

You can also download podcasts from here on MCBT


I hope you find it all helpful. This is a brief introduction to Talking therapies.

Speed reading for learning

Again, the concept of peripheral vision and training how to use this comes up in this post by Tim Ferriss, a very interesting man... Follow this link
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/07/30/speed-reading-and-accelerated-learning/