Thing 16

Wow! With Thing 16 i feel like i hit the jack pot of useful information and have been introduced to a ton of concepts that i haven't heard about before. I sent many articles home so that i would have time to delve into them in detail. The initial impression is that concentrating on the symptoms and dates and evidence is helpful in tracking for medical professionals. When i had a thrombopheblitis, i kept a self made chart of my INR results and the matching daily doses of Coumadin. the MD would happily request to take my small notebook and copy it for his medical record. Being a nurse, when i first got the blood clost, i visited the medical library and became familiar w/a graphic representation of the cascade of blood clotting and how much we don't know about the numerous blood factors involved.I realized how complicated this process of clotting was and that my specialist really had a detailed, up to date knowledge of this cascade and i didn't need to learn it. But it did help in my understanding of my treatment and retesting as new factors were discovered. I think there comes an 'edge' where a patient doesn't have the same training and experience as the specialists and needs to recognize this. But on the other hand, i think we can creatively increase the participatory part the patient plays. Tracking sx and txs is especially helpful and efficient in the MD visit. I will need to read some more to shape an opinion of patient-entered data as a foundation for research and medical conclusions.....for me there are some concerns having been trained on an IP research unit, i know the kind of mistakes that can be made, how we were trained to avoid them. Since health has been my life career i chose this topic in hopes of learning or 'catching up to' the new concepts being used/developed and i haven't been disappointed. There is a lot to pursue at my leisure, but now i have the connections to do that. thanks.