Faith, Love & Charity

Again, i was given a chance to follow my supervisor's clinic. I really like to see the way he approached different patient. It is so much different from other doctors and so much for me to learn.
One of the case i saw during this visit i saw was a 10 ten year old boy with Duchenne Myopathy. Usually this kind of patient will not live long and most would pass away at the age of 20. Therefore, my supervisor tried to find out whether the parents had told their child about the fact that he was going to 'leave' soon. As expected, the parents were not wiling to tell that cruel truth to their child but my supervisor adviced them to do so as this would deprived the opportunities of the child to fulfil his own wishes. He might have a plan for himself in the future and if he never got the chance to know that his life would not be that long, by the time he found he could never fulfill his dream he might blame or even condemn his parents for not telling him. Besides that, he is already 10, it is good to tell him as early when he is mature enough to face that so that he is given sufficient time to fulfill his dreams due to fact that most like he would not be able to move both his upper and lower limbs at all by the age of 16. Eventually, the parents accepted the advice but they wanted to have more time to think about it. I think the parents must have struggled a lot to accept his fact themselves and now they have to overcome another hurdles of telling their son. It is not easy but i know the parents will finally make a decision that they think is the best for their son.

The other case which i was quite sad about was another case of myopathy. The parents of the child had lost confidence in the doctors who carried out the muscle biopsy done on her child as the doctor retrieved adipose tissue instead of muscle which wasted all the effort and pain that the patient had gone through. Besides that, she also did not want to send her child to physiotherapy again as believe more in only traditional massage. I do not mean that traditional massage is useless, but i am very confidence that the physiotherapy can really do 'something' for this patient as i have seen quite a number of successful cases. However, it is hard to gain back the confidence from the parents once they had lost it. Thus, i think patient education from the very beginning is very important regardless of the disease, investigations or management. Anyhow, all i can hope is this parent would change her mind one day and do not give up.