Clinic Day 5

Last day of the week was clinical day 5.  It ended up being a short day due to our weekend traveling.  

I had one student who did a great job with his patient. He traveled from Mombasa for the weekend just to be mentored (which was about 6 hours). He had a patient that was in her eighties with general deconditioning and pain in multiple joints of her body.  He missed many key subjective questions but was able to get more information with my guidance. 

He picked up on her concern about arthritis and we together worked on a way to re-educate her on arthritis, movement, and function to help improve for confidence to live.  He really appreciated the new ideas for patient education that has not made it to this region of the world.

Martin and I spoke about passive modalities effect on patient compliance. He stated that heat packs and stim are expected. The patients will feel robbed if they don’t get it even if they got symptom relief with manual and exercise. He said the other population feels this way the most as they associate heat packs with therapists. He said they have been able to change the beliefs of younger patients and people who have not been to therapy before. This was a great conversation to have because we are struggling with similar issues in America with patients understanding of what a therapists can provide. 

I was also able to help one of the head therapists, Wilfreda, with a hard patient of hers.  She knew the gait deformity but was unable to pick out the compensation pattern and weakness that should be addressed.

After a half day we headed back to the house to wait for our guide to pick us up for our Safari.  He emailed us 30 minutes before he was supposed to get us stating he would arrive in 1 hour.  After he did not show we called and he said 30 more minutes.  He did this again and sadly he did not arrive until 4 hours after he was supposed to arrive.  Not only were we upset that we left clinic for nothing, but we could have also done something else with those 4 hours.  The staff of Grace House was also upset by the man because they said it was a bad reflection on them.

We were pretty upset to start the trip but after some great conversation and 5 hours of driving we made it to Masai Mara for a very late dinner and rest.

We were shocked to see that we were not camping, but “glamping”. The entrance looked like an all inclusive resort you would find in the Caribbean, buffet style food, and the tents had everything in a typical hotel room.