Coeliac Ignorance

 

We had a bad day yesterday in that my wife, Celia, went to hospital with a bad pain in her shoulder. It was so severe that she had to miss Court for the first time through illness in all her thirty or so years at the Bar.

Anyway they found her irregular heartbeat, which was described as a medical curiosity by a cardiac consultant in Liverpool, when she had our first childe nearly forty years ago. We spent the whole day in the hospital, whilst they did tests and in the end proved that she is fit and well. But they didn’t do anything for the shoulder.

The point is that the doctor, who saw Celia was on crutches and had serious arthritis. She asked if Celia was on a diet and she said because I was a coeliac, she was on a virtually gluten-free one. I then said have you tried that for your condition. She had no idea that it might help and when I told her that a consultant at Bury St. Edmunds recommended it to his patients, she was very surprised.

How much training do doctors have in the interrelationships between diseases?