Jan 1, 2020 First Episode of Lotek, health podcast! Wasabi, Walnut What’s Hurting My Tummy Wednesday

#lotekhealth

Intro to hospitals in high stakes healthcare industry

I thought I’d be an actor. In high school, my art school gave me the background of what performance means. My parents raised me as an entertainer. They owned a singing telegram business, so I saw it as normal to walk into someone’s place of work, meeting among friends, and entertain, sing and roast them for all their friends and family to see. Add being Shakespearean trained and emotionally drained through outdoor theatre, and I truly believed I would be an actor in the big time.

Acting coaches always pushed the idea of “raising the stakes”. Make this scene life or death! Pretend the words you say mean life or death for your character! If you don’t walk across the stage to deliver your personal truth then you will physically, not just emotionally die.

All bullshit. This didn’t become real until I worked in a hospital.

Here in the critical care unit of the hospital as a registered nurse where hi tech beds can quickly become death beds, the words I say do matter. By the time you meet me at the bedside though, it’s often too late to avoid severe disability. So, LOTEK is a health advocacy program where I act as a liaison for patients and their families before they’re put in a place to learn in a matter of days to weeks what it takes nurses 2-4 years to grasp and physicians around 10 years to master.

Why health is poorly packaged as a product.

When you buy a product normally in this capitalist economy, say food from a restaurant, you choose it from a menu. You buy the product off the menu, consume it and receive a receipt. It may not be what you believed it would be, but there is an understanding as to what exactly you were buying. You order a burger. You get a burger. This is not the case with healthcare.

For anyone hit with the tremendous bill from their hospital stay, you know that the itemized receipt is not very comprehensive. After a tragic experience like losing a loved one, it isn’t really even comprehensible.

Working in a hospital, I’ve found patients and their doctors aren’t speaking the same language. Generally, as consumers, we have a handle on what we’re buying as we choose it, like a burger. Health care, packaged as a product we didn’t expect to buy but find ourselves buying in the US, is not something laypersons have a grasp of outside of healthcare training and direct experience. We get our knowledge vicariously from highly inaccurate and overly sensational TV shows and movies. With LOTEK, I will break down many lofty scientific concepts by using everyday household objects and common tools.

LOTEK – Let Ourselves Translate Expert Knowledge

The 2 or 3 most emotionally vulnerable days of our year are not the most conducive to learning what takes practitioners at least 2-4 years to understand. So, I’m starting LOTEK. Let Ourselves Translate Expert Knowledge. Each video will break up a common health concern, issue or set of disease processes into 3 parts revolving around 3 simple concepts:

Disease begins at the cellular level
Everything is about balance
Health is everyone’s responsibility
If this helps bring understanding to even one family or loved one experiencing something discussed, then this will all be worthwhile. Thank you and let’s talk LOTEK!