About  ManageMySymptoms

This website is for people who have long term (chronic), maybe medically unexplained, symptoms that are affecting their life (and often livelihood, relationships, sense of wellbeing, etc) The aim is to look at ways in which you can approach those symptoms differently, and hopefully in a positive and practical way, to try to improve your quality of life and reduce the impact that those symptoms are having on your life.​

 

The site is written by an NHS GP with almost three decades of experience of caring for  generations of patients within a semi-rural community, i.e. providing long term continuity of care and getting to know patients, their families and circumstance really well, which is so valuable (and often sadly lacking in the NHS which is tragically so swamped in current, post-pandemic times). This has given the creator a very useful perspective on strategies that are helpful to patients in the longer term, and are not just quick fixes. The creator has also worked with a team and extended network of amazing and dedicated people, in multiple different roles, within and outside of the NHS, who have provided inspiration and learning over this time, regarding how best to help patients with all kinds of differing conditions, some of them explained by current medical knowledge but some of them not (or not yet).​

 

This website's logo comprises pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fitting together, because the creator has found that the concept of the jigsaw puzzle is a very useful one in approaching health conditions -

if you use just one tactic/puzzle piece (e.g. a new medication) to manage almost any health condition - let's think about hypertension (high blood pressure) - it is so much less effective than using several tactics together (fitting those puzzle pieces together to have greater impact).

So, if you take one tablet for your high blood pressure, it will almost certainly reduce that blood pressure a little. However, if you take a tablet and reduce your alcohol intake (if it was higher than the recommended), and reduce your consumption of salt (ditto), and increase the amount of exercise you do (if it was lower than the recommended), and improve your diet (more vegetables, "eat the rainbow", less ultra processed foods, less salt, etc), and manage your stress and/or any other mental health issues that you may be battling with, each of these will have its own positive effect and added together they are so much more powerful than just that little tablet. Indeed, as the creator has seen many times, the non-tablet strategies (once implemented and persisted with over time) can be so powerful that the tablet may even no longer be necessary...?

 

Find the pieces of your own jigsaw puzzle that have the most positive effects on and for you and see what can happen... ​A website/blog is of course a small and simple tool, in the vast world of health care and wellbeing, but fortunately a readily available and accessible one.

 

The creator is aware that there are many resources online that can be very helpful and informative, although, sadly, there are many that are negative and angst-ridden or even downright nasty which are not helpful at all, in fact can be quite the reverse. Thus, this website aims to be a place in which to share positive resources and strategies, which will be explained in more detail in the blog posts over time. The creator loves to learn and explore new ideas and seek wisdom from our own as well as other cultures from around the world and from differing approaches to health care and hopes that this website will help you to do this, too. It aims to develop into a place to take inspiration from and help you to change habits (always difficult!) and this might actually make much more difference to your longstanding symptoms than you might initially have thought...

 

Come on a journey with ManageMySymptoms, with an open mind, even if it feels like a wobbly step into the unknown, and see where it may lead you?

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Please be aware that all views expressed here are my own, and that I do not see any patients privately.