No school-related posts this week as I attend the National Conference for Pulmonologists & Thoracic Surgeons.  Don’t worry – that doesn’t mean I’m slacking off, it just means it’s all a bit condensed as I try to absorb volumes of information in just a few days..  (I’ll be back in Mexicali at Monday – eager and ready to pick up where I left off.. Hope the doctor is in full “Professor” mode.)

Attended some great lectures this morning including a talk regarding the evaluation of patient quality of life as a whole package (health, culture, socio-economic status, etc) as part of health and wellness promotion and treatment for patients with chronic respiratory disease.  (Sounds like a great nursing lecture, doesn’t it?  But you’d be wrong – it was presented by a physician, Dra. Sarai Toral Freyre, which just goes to show that all of the holistic practices that nursing has promoted over the last hundred years are starting to catch on.)  That’s always encouraging – too often ‘the body as a machine’ has predominated medicine over the years – which I think is such a limited view that misses much of the individuality involved when treating people, particularly people with serious or chronic illness.

Met some nice people; a nurse and a respiratory therapist who have been sharing their experiences from different corners of Mexico – also enjoyed a great lecture by Dr. Luis Torre Bouscoulet.  He is giving a two day lecture for certification in spirometry (and I would have liked to stay for the entire thing but I knew I could never pass the exam in Spanish.)  But I enjoyed his historical overview of spirometry.