Damian King: Indian Adventure for CALM

22.03.2019 Category: Clinic News Author: Lisa-Marie Ryan

As a specialist travel clinic, we are passionate about travel and get inspired by stories from our patients every day.

We meet interesting people day in, day out, both at the clinic and when we’re doing trade shows.

Following a chance meeting at the Adventure Travel Show in January, we felt inspired to support Damian King as he embarks on an extreme adventure across India.

Damian explained his plans to walk from North India to South India – starting at Kashmir and ending in Kanyakumari. This is a total of 2,547km aiming for 30miles per day – which is no easy feat!

Not only is Damian’s mission a personal extreme adventure to tick off the bucket list but a way to raise awareness and fundraise for CALM, Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM). If you are unfamiliar with this charity, they are leaders in the movement against male suicide. Which, unfortunately, is still the single biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK.

It is a sad fact that on average 84 men take their lives every week in the UK. As a society, we need to remove the stigma of mental health as a whole but specifically around gender expectations, gender norms and toxic masculinity which has embedded itself with our culture. As healthcare professionals, we strongly believe in promoting a healthy lifestyle, advocate for disease prevention and highlighting the importance of self-care and wellbeing. This is why we so passionately decided to support Damian. To be in some way a small (but essential) part of his adventure and assist in raising awareness for male suicide felt thrilling and essential. Part of our company ethos is to support the adventurous traveller so we said yes to becoming his medical partner, offering support for vaccinations, travel advice, medical kits, podiatry advice and also nutritional advice.

“The decision to work with the guys at Fleet Street Clinic was quite simple. I required a varied number of services which they offered. They are centrally located in between the West End and City, and more importantly, it doesn’t have the clinical feel of a doctors surgery like many do.”

              – Damian King

As a specialist travel clinic, we advocate the importance of good health whilst travelling and assist travellers to view health as one of the most important aspects of their adventure holiday. We have assisted with Damian in his preparation for his adventure from top to toe. Important parts of his pre-travel preparation were travel vaccinations alongside travel advice; highlighting risks from the weather, insects, animals, food and water. Other important health checks included a visit to the podiatrist to ensure his feet remained healthy during training and whilst walking, the nutritionist to speak about the impact of his diet whilst travelling and what he should and shouldn’t be eating in preparation for such a drastic amount of exercise and an in-body scan to document his training efforts which looks at weight distribution, muscle mass and body fat percentage.

We are proud to be a part of Damian’s journey and we wish him a fantastic and safe adventure. If you would like to follow Damian King’s adventure, you can find out more on his blog or on his Instagram.

If you are thinking of embarking on your own travel adventure and need a travel consultation appointment, you can book online.