Unknown Speaker 0:08
Hi and welcome to the motorsport coaching podcast sponsored by motivate Training Management. This is a podcast where we talk to drivers and industry experts to help you maximize your performances on and off the track. Let's get started with today's show Hey crew Welcome to Episode 123 of the motorsport coaching podcast. I am your host Linda Isley, founder of motivate training and management. This week about something a little bit different for you. We're talking to Katrina Robertson. Before I get into her intro, just like to remind you we've got an upcoming webinar, which is live and free next Tuesday, August the second Saturday at 7pm. Australian Eastern Standard Time. With the topic beat 10 things you can do now to help you gain sponsorship. If you'd like to register for that free event, please head over to the show notes or race over to motivate training.com.au forward slash capital W capital s capital W unfortunately, it does need to be in capitals in order for it to work lesson learned. Also, the link will be in today's show notes. Because if you cannot make it the recording, and workbook will be available after the event. So if you're interested in around how you can gain sponsorship right now, please race over and join us for our webinar. So 10 Today we're gonna be talking to Katrina Robertson. She's a qualified snugger fat and radiographer with over 14 years experience in the field of medical imaging. In 2017, Katrina decided to pursue her entrepreneurial passion and open her first medical imaging practice specializing in ultrasound. In 2019. She grew that business to a second site and she's conveniently located near buffets near our famous race track. So thanks to her multiple university degrees in industry experience Katrina has a thorough understanding of a range of pathologies, their symptoms and their imaging appearances. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about the role of ultrasound and pathology. The role that it plays with pure pain and your accuracy is bursitis. Hope you enjoyed today's episode. Don't forget if you haven't listened to last week's episode, we had the wonderful talented go in to sell episode 122 talking about her track to the former one. It is an inspiring story. And I hope you enjoy today's episode as much. Hi, Katrina. Welcome to the Motor Sport Coaching podcast.
Unknown Speaker 2:43
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yes, well,
Unknown Speaker 2:47
your story and careers a little bit different. We've never had anyone like you before on our show. But I'm very excited to hear your story. So tell us a little bit about you and what you offer.
Unknown Speaker 2:57
Yeah, so I'm I'm a snug fit. So I studied medical imaging at university. So I did radiography first so X ray CT, all those sorts of things. And then I went on to do a postgraduate degree in ultrasound. So as you sort of think the first thing that you'll think about with ultrasound is pregnancies, but we we do a wide range of ultrasounds so as far as motorsport goes, we ultrasound all the injuries that that come along with them with accidents and even just the general wear and tear of driving that it puts a lot of strain on the body. So we we deal with all that stuff. I started my own ultrasound practice back in 2017. So I I branched out on my own and opened opened an ultrasound practice then and expanded the business in 2019 to a second practice.
Unknown Speaker 3:59
Why radiographer? You break a lot of bars or you use
Unknown Speaker 4:09
heavily not a lot. But funnily enough, the deciding factor was that I broke my finger I fell off a horse and you know, the the horses motorbikes on race cars, right. And broke my finger and had to have an x ray and was talking to the radiographer. And at the time. My mom is a nurse, so I wanted something in the medical field. Didn't really want to spend all that time at university to be a doctor. Ironically enough, though, in order to do the two degrees, I've pretty much spent that much time you meet anyway. And didn't really want to go down the nursing route. And yeah, medical imaging was a good good sort of made You middle of the field that you got all that patient care, but it was a really interesting field too. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 5:07
And not only do you do those roles and have two businesses, you are a young mom as well.
Unknown Speaker 5:12
I am yeah. Yep. So I've got a one year old. Yeah. So yeah.
Unknown Speaker 5:16
Like you can relate to some of the mothers that we have, that the parents are offered, the athletes, having all to juggle all these things like working full time businesses, and a lot of the parents do have small businesses that they're trying to run, as well. How do you go about juggling your life at the moment?
Unknown Speaker 5:34
Yeah, so support definitely helps that. So family and friends that that are there to to help when needed? You know, a bit of you know, he can you have my little one for free few hours while I go and do this or lots of preparation to I guess is the the other big one a lot of lot of pre planning.
Unknown Speaker 6:01
Yeah. That's right. Whether you're running a small business, whether you're running a race team, or, or just trying to be a parent, just plan plan plan.
Unknown Speaker 6:12
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, don't don't worry too much when nothing, nothing goes the way you plan.
Unknown Speaker 6:21
I'll just say I'm there to read on the business side of things. So you're talking about being able to help the athletes with the injury side of things? Can you talk us through like the ultrasound process? And yeah, absolutely.
Unknown Speaker 6:33
So generally, what will happen is that you'll go to your doctor first, and they'll they'll do a physical assessment, and sort of have a have an idea of what they think might be going on. From there, they'll decide what the best imaging will be whether if they think you've broken a bone, whether you just have an x ray or a CT scan, if they think that you've torn your muscle or ligament tendon, then they might do both an x ray and an ultrasound. A next step tends to be an MRI as well as for those sorts of soft tissue structures. So they'll they'll decide what they think is going on and what the best imaging will be to see. And then they'll give you a referral. And you can call your local medical imaging practice and say I needed X ray CT, something ultrasound of this particular area, let's say it's a shoulder, so I need an ultrasound on my shoulder, and then you'll come in for your ultrasound. And for generally, if you're having both an x ray and an ultrasound, we'll do the X ray first, it can give us a good idea of what we might find on the ultrasound. So we can have a look in fue torn. If you tear your tendon away from the muscle, or from the from the bone, if you take it to the muscle away from the bone, then it can take some of the bone with it. So this will give us a good indication that there's something going on. And so we'll have a look at the x ray first, and then we'll bring you in for the ultrasound. Depending on where we're looking, you might need to get changed that we can get to the area. So if it's your shoulder, you might might get changed into a gown or something so we can get to your shoulder. And we put some at my practice some warm gel on your shoulder in other places that might be cold, but the gel on and then we use what we call a transducer. So it's like a like a camera, little probe that we put on the skin. And it produces sound waves. So just like we're talking, but they're a lot high frequency. So we can't hear them, but they move through the skin and through the layers of tissue. And depending on how how dense the structure is, it'll send the ultrasound waves back to us. So bone is really dense. So it sends all the ultrasound back to us. But the soft tissue will only send a little bit and the ultrasound machine clicks all this ultrasound wave information back and then it turns it into a grayscale image. So we get a get a picture out of it, which shows us the insights. Yeah. And so from there we can now interpret the images and decide whether there's anything going on and see those sort of muscle tendon ligament tears, any bony damage. This is more just in our our soft tissue so in our muscles, but in other areas of the body, we can see other things as well. So we can assess for all of that and then we write up a snuffers report for the radiologist. So it's a doctor that specializes in radiology, the radiologist will write their full report so they get to make the final call as to whether there's anything going on or not. They'll write their report and They'll send it back to your doctor. And then your doctor will have a look at the report, as well as all the other information they've got. So they'll have information on blood tests and any other imaging you've had, they might know that you've previously had a, a break of, of your wrist or something else. Now have all that information, they'll put it all together. And then from there, they can now they can figure out what's actually going on and then come up with a treatment plan. So from there, they might decide that you just need to go and see a physio or something like that. So they'll decide from there what the next step is
Unknown Speaker 10:37
for you, and can you use like ultrasound for a preventative measure? So we're just talking about after the incident and to see if something's torn or something like that. But if you've got a needle, can you kind of use it in a preventative
Unknown Speaker 10:50
way? Yeah. So generally, when we think of medical imaging, we think that you had an injury, but a lot of what we'll see is just general sort of wear and tear. So something you might have heard of is bursitis. So it's the bursar itself is aligning around different structures. So generally, there'll be either in between ligaments and muscles, or ligaments and bone. And the whole point of the Bursar is to make everything slide smoothly. So if we're doing something that our body doesn't like, and it can make that bursa become inflamed, so the whole area gets a bit upset, the person will get sick, and when it gets sick, everything just sticks together, it doesn't slide like it should, and then that will cause your pain. So if you've got little niggles, but you haven't had an injury, then quite often that can be what it is. So you can have an ultrasound and then from there, they can say, Oh no, there's no tears or anything going on. But as a preventative measure, we want you to see your physio or something like that and make sure that we're we're reducing whatever it is that the body doesn't like, so that everything moves moves well together.
Unknown Speaker 12:01
Yeah, so as a preventive measure at the track. Motivate actually has a tense so we have a message tent, where we have sports massage therapy, so if anyone throughout the race weekend does feel any niggles or any tightness, they do come and have a massage, or they can have an assessment for referrals. So sometimes we do have an osteoporosis was physiotherapist within those tents, most of them as sports massage therapist, but at times we have referred them on to actually go and get some further treatment, or get some further investigation with with an ultrasound to make sure that there's nothing to hide, especially after an incident has occurred. If someone does I mean in karting are one of the most when an incident happened, is my diagram boy. The cat goes off the back of someone's shoulder, do you recommend that they go straight to see an ultrasound? Or do they have to be referred by their GP before coming to see someone like yourself?
Unknown Speaker 13:00
Yeah, so they'll definitely need to go and see their doctor first. Some, some physios will be able to refer for X rays. Generally they won't be able to. Some can refer for an ultrasound as well, but Medicare won't pay for it. So they can, if they've got into their physio first they can get referrals. But for a Medicare rebate, they'll need to go to their their GP. But it's definitely worthwhile getting in there first. The other thing with those sort of niggly bits where there's nothing torn, but you know, a good massage, in some stretches can can do the trick. If they they have a bit of inflammation, then quite often Now, depending on the age of the patient as well, they'll do a steroid injection or a cortisone injection, which the whole purpose of that is to reduce the inflammation. So quite often, if they do the injection, then you can have physio on it because the pain is gone. So you can move a lot more easily. Whereas if it's all really inflamed, then it can hurt quite a bit to do those stretches. So that can be another another good thing too if if there hasn't been an injury but just a bit sore. And it's not getting a bit too sore to do the stretches and it's not really getting better, then that can be a good way to go about it too as a preventative maintenance that it can make make your massage and your physio work a lot better.
Unknown Speaker 14:30
Awesome. So you are located new our great track that is very exciting because you have lots of major race meetings out there most Absolutely. Sorry, yeah, we've we've got the brightest 1000 coming out. So of course, like if anyone's needing some assistance, get a referral from a doctor. But at the track, they can get a referral to come to you to come get some treatment over the course of that week. Yeah, definitely. In October, yes, no. So
Unknown Speaker 15:02
it's coming around awfully fast at this rate, it's,
Unknown Speaker 15:05
it's very, it's a time when the date was where we are.
Unknown Speaker 15:10
Yeah, I'm not sure how we're already halfway through the year, or more than halfway through the
Unknown Speaker 15:15
free pack is already starting to post so many weeks to Christmas. Oh my god, it's not
Unknown Speaker 15:24
so clever injury prevention. Katrina, you also mentioned about women's health. Obviously, pregnancy is the first thing that we think about when it comes to ultrasound. How else is ultrasound or work with women's health? Yeah, so we drivers and pit crew officials and volunteers?
Unknown Speaker 15:41
Yeah, absolutely. So basically, anything that you think about that we tend to deal with women's health, so period, pain, lumps and bumps, all of those sorts of things that as well as pathology, that may not have symptoms that we get straightaway. So like ovarian cancer and uterine cancer and those sorts of things. So we deal with all of that. One of the big ones will be period pain, we quite often have women come in with those symptoms. And sometimes it is just just your cycle. But a lot of the time there'll be an underlying cause for it or something that can be done about it. So sometimes that can just be that your cycles, just really heavy, really painful. And they might look at doing things like the contraceptive pill or a Mirena. So intrauterine device inside the uterus to control hormone levels, so that you're not not having that cycle as you normally would, that you're not getting that pain. There, they're generally the two things that they'll tend to go for as far as pain management when there's nothing wrong. So quite often, they'll do the ultrasound first to just check that there's nothing before they go on and do something else to control that pain, you might also have a really heavy flow, and that can definitely get in the way of your race meetings and things like that, that that's the last thing that you want, it's definitely going to impact your day and something that had medically we can get around to fun if need be. So something else that's quite often a cause for quite bad period pain, or just pelvic pain in general will be you might have heard of endometriosis. So the what happens with endometriosis is that the lining of the uterus basically gets outside the uterus. So where it shouldn't be. It can attach to the ovaries, the bowel, the bladder, the general places that it attaches to that shouldn't be. And when when we get our period, like the lining of the uterus does the parts that have gone outside the uterus that shouldn't be there, they bleed too. So that's why women with endometriosis get so much pain is because the the endometrium that's outside of the uterus is also doing that process as well. So you're getting numb, that inflammation and bleeding outside around around your ovaries and bladder and in bowel. So for. For those patients, we do ultrasound as well, because in some cases, in severe cases, we can pick that up on ultrasound. If they're getting chronic pain as well, then it could be that the endometriosis has got so bad that it's actually caused everything to sort of stick together. So we use ultrasound to see whether things move as they should. Yeah, so there's some things in women's health that we tend to look at. As far as women's health goes as well. We also do quite a few breast ultrasounds is the other other area. So for just screening when you don't have any symptoms, then mammograms are the best way to go for full screening, they'll pick up something along the lines of 95% of breast cancers, because those particular breast cancers all start with calcification, but for those are the 5% of breast cancers that don't start with how suffocation ultrasound will pick them up first. So for screening, we tend to like to do both of them to cover all our bases. But yep, so if you're over, over 50 Or if you're, if you've got a family history, then generally 10 years before that family member who was diagnosed then we tend to start screening in those groups. Or if you've got a lump changes in your breast pain, anything like that, then we do ultrasound for those as well
Unknown Speaker 19:58
with the women Mental health opportunities you'll need to go through the GP to get a referral to self. Was that something that they can still come to you and go? Hey, I felt like can you have a look before I go to my GP? Or is it still?
Unknown Speaker 20:11
Yeah, still still through your GP?
Unknown Speaker 20:15
No wonder and JP is always busy when I could just can't restrict for you to get.
Unknown Speaker 20:20
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Generally it is three GP first, there are some places that have set up different sort of women's health clinics that you can go straight there and get everything done in one go. So no, there is a place in Aubrey. And that's how they work that I think they must have a doctor on site as well. So you go and kind of book into their women's health clinic. And you can get everything done while you're there. So you can see the doctor, get the referral, and then go straight in and have your mammogram or have your ultrasound or whatever it is that you need. So we've got it set up that everything's just in one place, but in general, you'll need to get a referral first.
Unknown Speaker 21:03
And are you located near a doctor or within a doctor's practice? Or?
Unknown Speaker 21:07
Yes, so where we're sort of down around down the road, we're on the main street. So we're about a block away from the doctors. So it's still nice and close. Yeah, and just
Unknown Speaker 21:17
so you know that there are actually two ladies, I want to know. I want to do stuff I was doing a PhD around period pain and motorsports. So the effects of that, and another one is doing it roundabout breast tissue and the impacts of crushing and and what ways in effect of going forward, like does it rely on any deformities or anything like that? The Fixer hasn't breastfeeding? And so there's some research coming out around that alliance, specifically with motorsports. So I'll say thank you. Yeah, because many topics in said women in motorsport is definitely a growing area within motorsports. And but of course, I know, there's a lot of, I guess, the team owners, and just around about period pain, again, falling prey that was, you know, becoming, be becoming a driver as a profession. All of these concerns around all these health issues, potentially could come up, no different to what a guy could obviously get. They have their own spectrum of illnesses as well, but I didn't. It's more of a talking point. I'm around women in motorsports, definitely around the period pain and performance filled with endometriosis. You know, again, just even how you crash and the impact on on our pelvis on breast tissue, all of those main areas that, you know, fertilization and baby caring. And then there's like women that don't even want to have kids. So it's not even a plain fact. But of course, it's all part of the bigger picture of trying to get a better image of what does a woman in motorsport look like?
Unknown Speaker 22:48
Exactly, yeah. And the more more research that's done, and the more we look into it, the more we shine a light on it will help women in motorsport, and get people into motorsport if they've got those answers. So that's brilliant.
Unknown Speaker 23:03
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Katrina, for sharing that insight into ultrasounds, and X rays and injuries, preventative beside us. And India over the turistas, which I know is a very big, again, subject for a lot of women out there. So thank you for sharing your knowledge, get if anybody's up and around the Bathurst area and is requiring you Would you please contact Katrina account? Medical imagery. And yes, and Katrina, the details will be in today's show notes. Otherwise, are you on LinkedIn people couldn't have a chat with you there.
Unknown Speaker 23:37
I am on LinkedIn. Yes, yeah. So I'm my personal profiles, Katrina Robertson on LinkedIn.
Unknown Speaker 23:44
Cool. Thanks again, for joining us. Everyone. Stay safe, and we'll speak to you next week.
Unknown Speaker 23:49
Thank you. Thanks.
Unknown Speaker 23:52
Well, thanks everyone for listening to this week's show. I really hope you enjoyed that one as much as I did. Now remember all the show notes with the links and the specials mentioned in today's show are available over at motivate training.com Today you if you haven't already, I'd really appreciate if you could head to iTunes or Stitcher typing motorsport coaching SUBSCRIBE And leave us a review each week or read them out and you're going to multi George with a fantastic price. You have any questions or comments please email us at motivate train.com.au or head over to our Facebook page at motivate t until next time, take care
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
