Thursday, August 23, 2007

People

A lot has happened since my last post. There has been death and birth, marriage and break-ups, injuries and healing. I have also finished my second (of 4) clinics. Learned a lot, been very busy and now am packing for football camp. I am looking forward to relaxing up in nature. Have a lot of PT to catch up on and digest but for now I leave you with this quote:

“Learn avidly. Question repeatedly what you have learned. Analyze it carefully. Then put what you have learned into practice intelligently.” - Confucius

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Getting It In

Sorry for my delay in posting... to all my loyal readers...

Things get pretty busy around here... that is all I am really writing to say...

I am going to be discharging a patient or two today, evaluating a patient who has mastocytosis (a systemic condition with abnormalities in the mast cells), finishing up my case study and in-service... I am not going to go into all of the extra-curricular stuff at this point, just know I am highly motivated to get it all done somehow...

I leave you with the quote off of Frank Sinatra's tombstone... "The best is yet to come"

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

TA & Ankle DD

It's felt like a long time... but the summer seems to really slow things down...

Muscle of the week is the Transverse Abdominus. The main core muscle. It originates from the deepest layers of the thoracolumbar fascia and will come forward to pass deep to the rectus abdominus (the 6-pack muscle).
It's action is to compress and support the abdominal viscera (your guts and such :).
In 'activating your core' this is the first muscle to fire during trunk flexion and extension for stabilization.
Strengthening this muscle can help with a multitude of diagnoses including low back pain.

Speaking of diagnoses I will be evaluating a patient with complaints of ankle pain. While her symptom that it hurts most in the morning is usually very indicative of plantar fascitis, we will still be going through as thorough an eval as is possible in the hour we have.
Differential Diagnosis (DD) can be very tricky mainly because there are so many things that can go wrong. There are generally four categories that many musculoskeletal pathologies can fall under: connective tissue issue, inflammatory process, a combined 'disorder,' or fractures. Just for the ankle and foot in a very simplified DD approach we can break those 4 categories into about 30 possibilities. That's when we start playing detective.
I am almost at the end of my morning commute so I bid you adieu and look forward to sharing more with you :)