Cold Weather Health Concerns

Patients are going to be more concerned about the cost of living, so they are probably unlikely to want to turn on their heating earlier. And for particularly our elderly patients and our patients with circulatory disorders and things like that, or people with respiratory problems, that can actually become a problem if they are living in conditions where they are much colder than they ought to be and they should be and where the cold weather and the damp is actually going to exacerbate their health conditions. So we've just got to be more aware of the fact that patients coming into our clinics are probably going to be having a lot more of the manifestations of where cold weather does actually affect them. So we may see an increase in colds and things like that much earlier on, and not necessarily COVID, but just the normal viral cold that people get. We might see an increase in flus, which we normally see anyway during the winter, but it might just be a little bit of an earlier manifestation. I'm not entirely sure, I'm not an epidemiologist, but we may actually start getting more of the respiratory sort of things earlier on. From a fit perspective, I think we'll get more patients probably presenting earlier with things like shoulder length and that. And as always during the cold weather, I always worry that my patients with neuropathy mustn't present earlier on with burns than they did this last winter. So we have a problem where when people have neuropathy and they can't feel properly, they may try to heat their beds or keep their feet warm or their fingers warm using hot water bottles or any of these sorts of heating things that you get and you pop it into the microwave and you can apply heat. But obviously, if you've got neuropathy and a lack of sensation, we then do see an increase in burns. And last year, interestingly, we did see quite a significant increase in burns because people are not using their central heating as much so in order to stay warm they are using other forms of heat and I fear that this year we may be facing a similar sort of situation to last year.