{"id":1594,"date":"2011-03-21T12:16:24","date_gmt":"2011-03-21T11:16:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/?p=1594"},"modified":"2017-05-20T11:46:15","modified_gmt":"2017-05-20T10:46:15","slug":"bsg-conference-patient-seminar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/bsg-conference-patient-seminar\/","title":{"rendered":"BSG Conference: The Patient Symposium"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Last week I went to part of a gastroenterology conference: the symposium for patients<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This was organised by the British Society of Gastroenterology<\/a>. I’ve never been to one before, and this was a particularly interesting experience. There were – literally – hundreds of medics around the conference centre, and about 60 people attending the patients seminar. Not all these were coeliacs, though Coeliac UK were there: some were Crohn’s sufferers, and others had IBS. Some (like me) weren’t patients at all, but were there out of interest, or representing a patient. I sat next to a dietician who was there as part of her professional development, which I was delighted to see. She told me that she’d been astonished to learn how variable the dietician service-offering was across the country. Where she’d worked, they had offered three-monthly checkups initially, until people got the hang of the gluten free diet, but in some places – as we know – people are offered much less than that.<\/p>\n

I took copious notes, which I’ll try and decipher for you over the next few days, on each of these four topics:<\/p>\n