Using Symptom Checklists to Sell Drugs

by Pauline W. Chen, M.D.

Phys Ed: The Dangers of High Heels

by Gretchen Reynolds

Illustration by Henrik Sorensen

Really? The Claim: Drinking Water Can Help Lower the Risk of Diabetes.

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

THE FACTS

There are many reasons to stay properly hydrated, but only recently have scientists begun to consider diabetes prevention one of them. The amount of water you drink can play a role in how your body regulates blood sugar, researchers have found.

The reason: a hormone called vasopressin, which helps regulate water retention.

When the body is dehydrated, vasopressin levels rise, prompting the kidneys to hold onto water. At the same time, the hormone pushes the liver to produce blood sugar, which over time may strain the ability to produce or respond to insulin.

One of the largest studies to look at the consequences was published last year in Diabetes Care, a publication of the American Diabetes Association. French scientists tracked more than 3,000 healthy men and women ages 30 to 65 for nearly a decade. All had normal blood sugar levels at the start of the research.

After nine years, about 800 had developed Type 2 diabetes or high blood sugar. But those who consumed the most water, 17 to 34 ounces a day, had a risk roughly 30 percent lower than that of those who drank the least. The researchers controlled for the subjects’ intake of other liquids that could have affected the results, mainly sugary and alcoholic drinks, as well as exercise, weight and other factors affecting health. The researchers did not look at eating habits, something future studies may take into account.

THE BOTTOM LINE

There is some evidence that proper hydration can help protect against high blood sugar, though more research is needed.

See the original article on the New York Times website.

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr’s life, I’d like to
invite you to embrace this paradox -

You and I are equal.
You and I are different.
You and I are the same.

This combination moves mountains, shifts cultures,
and makes heroes for the ages.

You and I are equal. My dreams are as important as yours.
Your pain is as vivid to you as mine is to me. My differences
from you do not make me inferior. You may not understand me.
You may not feel what I feel, but what I feel is just as important.
Sounds easy, actually difficult. All human children have an instinct
of “me first.” It’s a survival instinct. But how do you mature out of that?

You and I are different. ”Equal but different” can be difficult to process.
When we find people equal to ourselves, we tend to assume that they
are the same. But they’re not. That’s the paradox. You and I are each individuals,
with our own experience, our own needs, and our own freedoms.
Appreciate that I am different from you, and that the way I see the world
is different from the way you see it.

You and I are the same. Once you appreciate someone’s difference
and their equality to you, with what emotion, what energy do you act
on that insight? Is it simply an intellectual observation? Or does it change
the way you live? This is where Dr. King became a leader for all ages.
He insisted not only on equality, but on brotherhood. In other words,
there is an underlying passion and love for the other’s being. It’s not
just about tolerating differences. It’s about appreciating them, relishing them,
and protecting your brother’s or sister’s right to be who they are. Beneath
the difference and equality, there is universal love.

The above comes from Mark Peysha, CEO of Robbins-Madanes Training, where they teach Strategic Intervention. To learn more visit the website.

At Egoscue, we try to embrace these three truths with each client and how we treat their pain.

You and I are equal. We all share the same design, the blueprint for human posture. We all have eight load joints that line up with each other vertically and horizontally at 90 degree angles. We are symmetrical. We are designed to live a pain free and active life without limitations and enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing that.

You and I are different. We are all individuals with different life experiences, different goals, and different dreams. Some of us want to run ultra marathons, compete in the Olympics, or play professional sports. Some of us want to sit at a desk and work 14 hour days and watch movies for fun. There is nothing wrong or right with either of these lifestyles and our role at Egoscue is to recognize that and help you live the life you want to live – pain free.

You and I are the same. We are equal in our design, different in our goals, and the same in that our bodies are designed perfectly for whatever life we choose to live.

Egoscue takes the beauty in these statements and treats each client as equal, different, and the same to help you achieve your individual goals and dreams by giving you the tools to pursue them pain free. Knowing that you are not broken, nothing is genetically wrong with you, nothing is wrong about your lifestyle, and rediscovering the resiliency of your human body give you peace of mind to enjoy your life to the fullest.

Above is a beautiful quote by Martin Luther King Jr., one of the great minds of the last century, but the reality is we no longer live like we are made to live together. We have lost community and with it the interdependence of our lives.

Charles Eisenstein wrote a wonderful piece called “To Build Community, an Economy of Gifts” that explains:

Community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own. That is because community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don’t depend on your neighbors—or indeed on any specific person—for anything. You can just pay someone to do it, or pay someone else to do it.

In former times, people depended for all of life’s necessities and pleasures on people they knew personally. If you alienated the local blacksmith, brewer, or doctor, there was no replacement. Your quality of life would be much lower. If you alienated your neighbors then you might not have help if you sprained your ankle during harvest season, or if your barn burnt down. Community was not an add-on to life, it was a way of life. Today, with only slight exaggeration, we could say we don’t need anyone. I don’t need the farmer who grew my food—I can pay someone else to do it. I don’t need the mechanic who fixed my car. I don’t need the trucker who brought my shoes to the store. I don’t need any of the people who produced any of the things I use. I need someone to do their jobs, but not the unique individual people. They are replaceable and, by the same token, so am I.

That is one reason for the universally recognized superficiality of most social gatherings. How authentic can it be, when the unconscious knowledge, “I don’t need you,” lurks under the surface? When we get together to consume—food, drink, or entertainment—do we really draw on the gifts of anyone present? Anyone can consume. Intimacy comes from co-creation, not co-consumption, as anyone in a band can tell you, and it is different from liking or disliking someone. But in a monetized society, our creativity happens in specialized domains, for money.

To forge community then, we must do more than simply get people together. While that is a start, soon we get tired of just talking, and we want to do something, to create something. It is a very tepid community indeed, when the only need being met is the need to air opinions and feel that we are right, that we get it, and isn’t it too bad that other people don’t … hey, I know! Let’s collect each others’ email addresses and start a listserv!

Community is woven from gifts. Unlike today’s market system, whose built-in scarcity compels competition in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. Wealth circulates, gravitating toward the greatest need. In a gift community, people know that their gifts will eventually come back to them, albeit often in a new form. Such a community might be called a “circle of the gift.”

Fortunately, the monetization of life has reached its peak in our time, and is beginning a long and permanent receding (of which economic “recession” is an aspect). Both out of desire and necessity, we are poised at a critical moment of opportunity to reclaim gift culture, and therefore to build true community. The reclamation is part of a larger shift of human consciousness, a larger reunion with nature, earth, each other, and lost parts of ourselves. Our alienation from gift culture is an aberration and our independence an illusion. We are not actually independent or “financially secure” – we are just as dependent as before, only on strangers and impersonal institutions, and, as we are likely to soon discover, these institutions are quite fragile.

Given the circular nature of gift flow, I was excited to learn that one of the most promising social inventions that I’ve come across for building community is called the Gift Circle. Developed by Alpha Lo, co-author of The Open Collaboration Encyclopedia, and his friends in Marin County, California, it exemplifies the dynamics of gift systems and illuminates the broad ramifications that gift economies portend for our economy, psychology, and civilization.

To learn how to create your own Gift Circle and recreate the power of a real community like Martin Luther King, Jr. knew read the rest of Charles Eisenstein’s article in Yes! Magazine.

I’m going to leave you with his last paragraph which sums up the benefits of a community built on the Gift Circle:

On a less tangible level, any gifts we give contribute to another kind of common wealth – a reservoir of gratitude that will see us through times of turmoil, when the conventions and stories that hold civic society together fall apart. Gifts inspire gratitude, and generosity is infectious. Increasingly, I read and hear stories of generosity, selflessness, even magnanimity that take my breath away. When I witness generosity, I want to be generous too. In the coming times, we will need the generosity, the selflessness, and the magnanimity of many people. If everyone seeks merely their own survival, then there is no hope for a new kind of civilization. We need each others’ gifts as we need each others’ generosity to invite us into the realm of the gift ourselves. In contrast to the age of money where we can pay for anything and need no gifts, soon it will be abundantly clear: we need each other.

Listen to the radio how by clicking the image below or following this link: http://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/58897/graceful-aging-how-to-turn-back-the-functional-clock

“Millions of us sit for a living and we’re paying a price for doing it. The body is designed to move, and yet millions of people spend many hours each day stuck in a chair or seated behind a computer, a desk or a steering wheel. Extended sitting has a negative impact both on our musculoskeletal system and on our metabolic health. Studies show that people who sit the most have higher incidences of cancer, for example, than those who sit less. Those with ‘sedentary’’ jobs also tend to have more back pain and more time lost from work because of pain than those with more active jobs. Join us as we talk about strategies for not just surviving a desk job but how to thrive in one. I’ll be joined by John Elder, our Nashville clinic director, and William Withrow, an ergonomic expert here in Austin. If you spend a lot of time sitting each day, you can’t afford to miss this show. Join us, your body will thank you!”

Listen to the show by clicking the image below or following this link: http://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/58695/how-to-survive-your-desk-job

And don’t forget, if you do have to sit, make sure you are sitting correctly as described in the video below:

“Osteoarthritis affects tens of millions of people both in the US and abroad, and there are probably tens of millions more with some arthritic change present in their spine or other joints. Join us as we talk about what arthritis really is, what are the factors that cause it, how to stop arthritic progression dead in its tracks, and how to reverse and heal any arthritic damage you already have. I will be joined by a very special guest, Dr Victor Carsrud from People’s Pharmacy and the Lakeline Wellness Clinic here in Austin, Texas. Dr Carsrud is both a chiropractor and a naturopath, and has advanced certifications in clinical nutrition, clinical pain management and family practice. Join us as we discuss the latest strategies for healing arthritis, naturally!”

Listen to the hour long program by clicking the image below:

Dr. Christo is one of America’s leading experts on relieving acute and chronic pain. For 8 years, he directed the Multidisciplinary Pain Fellowship Training Program and for 5 years the Blaustein Pain Treatment Center at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the foremost medical centers in the world. Dr. Christo is a board certified, Harvard-trained anesthesiologist and Hopkins-trained pain medicine specialist. He lectures internationally, serves on editorial boards, teaches, co-edited 3 textbooks on pain, and has published over 60 articles and book chapters on many topics related to pain treatment. Dr. Christo hosts Aches and Gains, the first talk show on pain and pain relief that airs weekly on WBAL Radio, 1090 AM. He is widely consulted by the media on the topic of pain and has appeared as a guest on Dr. Mehmet Oz’s satellite radio show, NPR radio (The Diane Rehm Show and Talk of the Nation), Good Morning America Health, and Retirement Living Television’s Healthline, hosted by Dr. Kevin Soden. He is the pain expert for the live Web Chat series on Pain Management, hosted by the Tribune newspapers and Baltimore Sun.

Listen to the podcast of the show on Dr. Christo’swebsite by clicking the image below:

Members of the Broadway cast of “Godspell” do their flexible best. From left: Uzo Aduba (doing the wheel), George Salazar (extended-hand-to-big-toe pose) and Nick Blaemire (headstand).

How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body is the title of a recent New York Times article by William J. Broad discussing how yoga isn’t always the magic cure for all physical and mental ailments, but can and does cause physical harm in the way of injuries quite often to both novice and experienced yogis. William Broad learned from Glenn Black, a yoga teacher of nearly four decades, whose devoted clientele includes a number of celebrities and prominent gurus, that “awareness is more important than rushing through a series of postures just to say you’d done them. But then he (Black) said something more radical. Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.”

The article goes on to say:

“Not just students but celebrated teachers too, Black said, injure themselves in droves because most have underlying physical weaknesses or problems that make serious injury all but inevitable. Instead of doing yoga, “they need to be doing a specific range of motions for articulation, for organ condition,” he said, to strengthen weak parts of the body. “Yoga is for people in good physical condition.”

The article goes on to tell the scary stories of people injuring their backs, necks, & hips, impinging nerves and having strokes – all caused by or related to yoga.

I personally enjoy yoga and think it has a lot of benefits, but as the article points out, only for people in good postural balance. Every client we see in our clinic learns that in order to reap the benefits of yoga, weight lifting, running, swimming or any other physical activity, you must first align your body with Egoscue. We use the phrase “Straighten Before You Strengthen.” If your posture is out of balance most activities you do will end up strengthening your imbalances and causing more harm than good in the long run. That’s why you hear things like “I used to run but not any more because my knees are bad because of running” or “I used to love golf but my back can’t handle it anymore” or “football wrecked my back and neck and I’ve hurt ever since”. But it was never the activity that caused the damage but the misaligned posture that allowed the damage to occur. This same principle applies to yoga, Pilates, Zumba, gardening, hiking, skiiing, and every other activity.

What I do and what I tell my clients is to do an Egoscue menu before any activity to bring the body back into balance to help prevent injury and pain and gain all the positive benefits of the activity.

What do you do before exercise to balance your body?

Have you been injured doing yoga?

What did you learn from that experience?