Saturday, May 8, 2010

Review of Allergy Clinic post

I was pleased this week to discuss my blog on the Devon Allergy Clinic this week with its lead clinician, Marleen.
It was refreshing to have a mature chat with someone leading an alternative clinic that didn't just settle into a pointless argument and I was impressed by her approaching me to discuss it.
I feel that in my blog I was mainly critical of the Med-Tronik (not Medtronic) machine she uses, the RM10.
She was concerned that this criticism might detract from the more mainstream approach she uses to food allergy and intolerance. On balance I feel that the blog was targeted at this machine and that the conventional approaches she uses weren't explicitly criticized.
Aligning herself with the Truth Campaign's Steve Hopwood's Arcturus Clinic may have led me to believe that Marleen is more wacky than actually she turns out to be. Her training and diploma in Allergy are entirely mainstream.
The area of food intolerance is however an area where many people who suffer do feel the need to go seeking help. I do recognize that in medicine we are not well equipped at all to advise or help people with food intolerances and that we do not have the answer a lot of the time. (I worked in 1993 in Martin Stern's  Allergy Clinic in Leicester and understood from that time some of the difficulties see MAARA and the older, pretty much out of date site of his now, AAIR). This is therefore an area where people will seek help in other directions an I feel they must be careful in judging the qualities of the alternative help they seek. On a separate matter she brought me up on my selective posting of comments regarding the blogs.
In fact the only comments responding to all the blogs on the site so far that I haven't posted have been hers. I can't recall any other comments for any other discussion that I haven't felt able to post.
I don't think that this was because it was her, but more that this isn't really a chat room for discussion, and that seemed to me to be what her comments were inviting.
I shall think a bit more though about the posting of comments.
I have just now been reading one of the BBC blogs on the reporting of Taliban casualties in Afghanistan. I find the comments section uncomfortable reading. This is what can happen. So I appreciate comments- positive or negative; but don't wish it to become a discussion forum.
Any comments or suggestions to how I approach this appreciated- I'll read them all, but I may not publish them!

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