Tech, Healthy and business

To understand physiology, you have to understand cells. To understand cells, you’ve got to understand DNA and self-replication. And you can’t understand DNA unless you put them in the context of chemistry and physics … Atoms make the world Atoms are the building blocks of nature. They are mostly empty space: a tiny clump of protons and neutrons, like a baseball floating in the centre of a stadium, plus some electrons whizzing around the stands like peanuts. What gives it substance, then? Only the weird, extreme, and arbitrary forces of the universe hold it together. Like magic, you simply can’t wedge anything else between the electrons and the nucleus — and so they seem solid. Add a single proton to an atom, you get a different kind of atom. If you add too many, they don’t hold together well, and the structure is radioactive, and sheds subatomic particles and energy that can disrupt other matter. There are several dozen kinds of more or less stable atoms, each one of them called an...

A silent, anonymous place I was still a child the last time I’d seen it. The hospital was an anonymous place my parents had taken me to, somewhere in the big city, far from home. I didn’t know where I was at the time, but when I saw it again as an adult, there was a match with something stored in my skull: the outline of the building like a stack of building blocks, the primary colours, the silence that seems out of place around a place built for children. Medical science failed me in that hospital. I was diagnosed early with “slow growth syndrome,” and this was the first mistake that science made with me: giving it a name. Slow growth syndrome is no syndrome at all. Some people grow slowly. So what? I was small for my age. I didn’t have a pathology: I had a velocity. I was taking my time. Nevertheless, the doctor wanted to keep an eye on me, so my parents dutifully took me back every two years to be measured and the pace of my growth evaluated for more distressing signs of oddity. I...

"Pain-free range of motion’ or early mobilization exercises can help you heal" PF-ROM is physical therapy talk for “pain free range of motion.” When a therapist evaluates an injury, he or she will be interested to see how far you can move affected joints without hurting. Sometimes, of course, you can’t move at all without pain. But in most injuries, even many serious ones, you will have at least some painless movement. And whatever you’ve got, you should use. When you are hurt, the pain-free range is your new best friend: that’s the range you’ll be exercising in for a while. Pain free range of motion exercises are also known as “early mobilization.” Use it or lose it “Use it or lose it,” they say. And it’s true. While many seemingly simple medical questions are controversial, this one appears to be straightforward: plenty of recent research demonstrates that early mobilization is A Very Good Thing. A 2006 study of people with surgically repaired achilles tendon ruptures sh...

I often need to talk to clients about switching them to endurance training at the gym. Usually, they have noticed that their usual strength training workout isn’t working: it feels too intense, it feels exhausting “and not in a good way,” they don’t seem to be making progress anyway, and they are worried that training may be a problem for a current injury or pain problem. Often, they have already stopped working out altogether. If you enjoy the gym, this is an exasperating situation. You are eager for a solution. You want to get back to work! If you don’t especially enjoy the gym — if you are only strength training for weight loss, or as part of a general fitness program that your doctor put you up to — then you are eager for an excuse to stop! What’s going on here? Why do strength training workouts sometimes seem to stop working? And how can a switch to endurance training help? Quick definitions If you’ve spent any time at the gym, you will have heard people talking about “reps” f...

Patients with stubborn pain problems often want to know the odds that a proposed therapy will work. Who wants to waste time or money on another therapeutic approach without a sense of whether or not it’s going to work? Is there a 20% chance that massage therapy will resolve your hip pain? But the margin of error on that estimate is so large that the estimate is meaningless: 20% +/- 75%? In other words, it is simply unknown. Therapy may go very well, or it may be futile, or the results may be somewhere in the middle. I have seen many examples of every possible outcome. Hunches about the potential of therapy are essentially useless: they are wrong enough often enough that it’s really not worth paying much attention to them. Excellent results sometimes come from cases that seemed hopeless, and sometimes we hit a wall when for some reason it seemed like an easy challenge. The margin of error is so large that the estimate is meaningless. Battle of the (charming) experts The uncertainty ...

Clients often ask me how we are going to know whether or not massage therapy is “working.” Sometimes it’s easy: you know it’s working when you feel better! But many cases are not so straightforward … Consider the example of iliotibial band syndrome, a common injury that stops runners in their tracks. Resting is a crucial part of therapy, yet you can’t tell whether or not it’s healing without trying to run. How are you supposed to tell what’s happening without testing it out? Here are some technical indicators that we use to evaluate progress in massage therapy. Symptom relief Symptom relief is absolutely the bottom line! If your symptoms aren’t improving with a reasonable period of time, therapy isn’t working. There is some “wiggle room” for things getting worse before they get better (see below). As a general rule of thumb, though, you should question the value of any therapy if your symptoms aren’t improving, whatever they are. About 3–5 hours of massage therapy, give or take, sh...

You are a biological entity. A living thing. An animal. An organism. You are a great galaxy of cells, the smallest units of life, a community of ten trillion. They all breathe together. You are ten trillion life forms, the sum of which is entirely different from the parts. Do the stars added together have a mind? Is the cosmos awake? Your community is alive with communication. Your cells talk to each other, intricately, intimately. You are filled with the whispering of microscopic lives. What language do I speak to myself? The language of nerves and glands, at least, but probably even more subtle dialects exist. We do not know the secrets of tumours yet, nor the detailed gossip of undifferentiated cells. No one on planet earth can say with the slightest certainty how consciousness arises from the ruckus of ionic currents in our skulls, or even if it does; the brain may be but an instrument, a lens through which we study ourselves. You would likely die without the quiet energies tha...