Core Flexibility and Lower Back Pain

/in /by

On any given day, lower back pain afflicts 25% of the population; 80% of all adults will experience it as some point in their life, and it’s still a major cause of lost work days and workman compensation claims. Face it, as long as we walk upright, we’re going to have lower back pain of some sort.

Some lower back is due to various kinds of injuries. They must be handled within the parameters set forth by your doctor and orthopedist. Most lower back pain, however, is caused by a group of muscles called our core.

In general, lower back pain is the result of two contradictory conditions: abdominal muscles that are too loose; and lower back muscles, hamstrings, and quadriceps that are too tight. The solution is to stretch the tight and strengthen the weak. As I said Tuesday, there are many online sources to find those stretching and strengthening exercises. The most important point is to do them regularly; if I miss my routine more than two days in a row, I can feel it. If you stop when you start to feel better, you’ll soon feel worse again.

Your core also contributes to the final physical approach to living every day you’re alive. I’ll cover that on Saturday.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: http://bit.ly/33zjJfh

How Flexible Are You?

/in /by

Living every day you’re alive requires flexibility. Range of motion in your joints is important to your ability to move, but it can be difficult. As the years add up, touching your toes with your knees locked, whether sitting on the floor or standing, lifting your arms over your head, or even lifting your arms to shoulder level can be a challenge.

Connective tissue tends to tighten as we age; it’s another case of use it or lose it. And when I say age, I mean from teen years on. Later, after we’ve torn ligaments, sprained ankles, been in accidents, and on and on, if we haven’t worked on our range of motion, we can end up restricted in our ability to move. The less we move, the more restricted we can get.

The obvious way to increase flexibility is to stretch. There are dozens if not hundreds of programs online, but I would recommend that you get an examination by a physical therapist who can identify your strengths and weaknesses and prepare a program just for you, taking into account your current level of flexibility and previous injuries. The older you are, the more strongly I recommend physical therapy, because if you stretch too far and damage connective tissue, you’ve just made your situation worse. Another option, especially if you’re younger or more fit, is to try yoga, which is an overall muscle-strengthening and stretching program. Take a class with an experienced instructor so you can get feedback on whether you’re doing the movements correctly.

Stretching is something you should do every day. There’s one area that needs special attention and that’s your core. I’ll cover that on Thursday.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Preventing Muscle Loss

/in /by

This final installment on muscle focuses on keeping the muscle mass you’ve got. That’s one of the keys to living every day you’re alive: the ability to move at every age. There are three things that are important to hanging onto muscle.

  • Use it or lose it. Actually, you’re going to lose it not matter what, but the degree to which you will is partially dependent on using it. Whenever you can take the stairs, take them. Whenever you can lift something, lift it. While I would hate it personally, it was better when we had to get up and actually walk to the television to change the channel. More today than ever, we don’t take the opportunity to build muscle or increase stamina.
  • Exercise regularly. No matter your age, there’s always something you can do. Orthopedic issues happen as we get older—arthritis in hands, shoulders, hips, and knees, or torn ligaments and cartilages. They can all put limitations on what we can do. We have to work within those restrictions and do as much as we can to maintain and even increase what we have. A session with an excellent physical therapist (ask your doctor if you qualify for some free sessions) or certified personal trainer could be worth the money. It’s never too late to begin. Research has shown that even people over 100 years old can increase strength and stamina.
  • Consider taking essential amino acids every day. While the focus has been on what EAAs can do for people who train hard, the bulk of the research has been done on people 50 and older. It’s clear you can slow down muscle loss and increase muscle strength by exercising regularly and taking EAAs every day. I’ve been taking them the days I lift, but I’m considering taking them every day. In continuing to research the benefits, there doesn’t seem to be a downside to taking EAAs. There’s some preliminary research that indicates that taking EAAs may even be beneficial for pre-diabetics to reduce insulin levels and triglycerides if they exercise regularly as well.

The purpose for the month’s Memos is showing you how to learn to live every day you’re alive. Muscle is critical to that goal. We’ll move on to another important physical component of living next week.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Skeletal Muscle: Strength

/in /by

This week, we’re turning our attention to skeletal muscle. Skeletal muscle allows us to move and to lift ourselves and other objects. The two primary features are strength and stamina. Let’s begin with strength.

A simple definition of strength is the most weight you could lift once. That could be as little as a couple of pounds, or it could be as much a thousand pounds as some weight lifters have done. To me, as a minimum, strength is the ability to be able to do everyday tasks. We’ll start with the most fundamental, which would be sitting down in a chair or on a commode and then having enough leg strength to stand up. It would be enough to be able to lift a bag of groceries. To lift a hammer to hit a nail. To hold a hair dryer over your head while you do your hair. You can probably think of a few more.

Years ago, I mentioned to my mother-in-law that most women over 65 can’t lift 10 pounds. We lose strength as we age. She had just gotten back from grocery shopping and she picked up a 10-pound sack of flour. She began lifting it up over her head and back down to her lap and said, “Look Chet, I can do that!” She was in her mid-seventies at the time.

Strength can vary by body joints. With two torn biceps, I don’t have nearly the strength in my arms and shoulders as I used to, but I still have pretty good leg strength and pretty good back strength; my exercise routine includes strength training for all those areas.

How do you increase strength? Challenge the muscles to lift more weight than you currently can for any different set of muscles: your shoulders, your arms, your quads, your calves, and of course, there’s your core. I’ll save that for later in the month. Next time, we’ll take a look at muscular stamina.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Exercise Your Heart, Part 2

/in /by

Did you ever have to hurry to catch a connecting flight? Walk fast or maybe even jog? Were you able to do it?

How about carrying a child who weighs 45 pounds for a quarter mile because she’s hurt her foot? Could you do it?

That’s where your heart reserve comes in: facing challenges that put your heart to the test. Everyday training helps, but getting fitter is also important for those occasions when you need more. If your physician says you can do it, interval training is the solution to building a reserve.

Intervals have been around for decades, and they became a fad with something called High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). They’re the same thing except that HIIT is supposed to replace all other aerobic exercise to save time. I’m sorry, but it’s just not enough. Doing well on a fitness test isn’t the same as living.

The idea is to exercise as fast as you’re able for 30 to 60 seconds, then rest for one or two minutes, sometimes even more. Repeat the cycle eight to twelve times and you’re done. For some people, walking faster for 30 seconds is enough; for others turning up the intensity on a bike to the highest level for 60 seconds would be the intensity. It doesn’t matter your level when you begin; it will help you build a reserve for challenges. That’s something we all need. Again, you have to check with your physician before exercising to build a baseline or a reserve. It’s one of the keys to living every day.

Think we’re done with exercise? Nope. We’ll turn to those other muscles next week.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Exercise Your Heart, Part 1

/in /by

In my opinion, the single most important thing you can do to be able to live life at your best is to exercise your heart. Every day. You don’t have to run marathons; you don’t ever need to run at all. You just need to train your heart every day. I’ve broken it down into two components that I’ll call baseline and reserve.

The aerobic baseline for your heart is just that: the level of fitness you need to accomplish every day tasks. The baseline will be different based on your age, your initial fitness level, and what your everyday activities are. That’s as simple as walking across a room and as challenging as being a laborer on a construction site or moving furniture up five flights of stairs.

If there are no orthopedic issues, the simplest exercise is walking or it could be long-distance running or bike riding. The goal is to get your heart rate elevated enough to cause the heart to beat faster than it does when resting. That trains the heart in more ways than I can explain.

The simplest way to describe how to do it’s this way. Walk fast enough so that you have to take a deep breath once in a while but you can carry on a conversation. If you can’t talk, slow it down. But if you can sing, that’s too slow. You can use that across every aerobic type of exercise from aerobics to Zumba. The goal is at least 30 minutes most days of the week.

You also need a reserve and I’ll talk about that on Saturday.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

How to Live Every Day

/in /by

“What’s the point of being alive if you can’t really live?”

That’s what a colleague and I arrived at when discussing the purpose of a program we’re working on, but it speaks to each and every one of us. To be living every day we’re alive. I suspect one of the reasons we limit our future is that we can’t see the best version of ourselves that’s possible. We let current limitations set our future expectations. That’s just wrong.

No matter our age, we should try to be the best version of ourselves. This is especially important as we get older. What we do or don’t do today will dictate our ability to really live one, five, or even 20 years from now—physically, mentally, emotionally. The ability to live each and every day until it’s time to check out.

The October Memos are going to provide the latest research on how to be the best version of yourself both now and in the future. In other words, the how. We all start with some challenges, some more severe than others, and we may face more in the future. But you can be better than you are today; you just have to believe it. That’s lesson one: believe it’s possible.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

AI and Healthcare

/in /by

What if, at some point in the future, your next physical is done via a holographic physician? The hologram will be chosen specifically for you, based on age, gender, and other characteristics collected from your posts on social media, websites you’ve visited, music you’ve listened to, shows you’ve watched on television or whatever replaces that in the future. Even the voice will be one that’s chosen just for you. Within seconds, maybe a few minutes, you completely forget that you’re not talking to a real human physician; you’re talking to something created with artificial intelligence. He or she is now your “physician.”

Another article I read had nothing to do with the medical profession. It had everything to do with the development of artificial intelligence (AI) by Google. It could take decades to get to any semblance of AI at this point although there’s an acceleration in technology that seems to happen. The question is whether it will be a good thing or not.

Certainly, there will be a vast amount of data collected from you: blood and urine for sure. DNA as well as the microbiome and maybe things we haven’t considered before such as odors. Computers will be able to analyze billions of bits of data in milliseconds. They can scan obscure medical journals and everything ever written about any condition. But then comes the real trick: the ability of the machine to put that all into a diagnosis and if necessary, a treatment plan.

Could AI do all that? Sure, based on just numbers and data and probabilities. The problem would be this: “Wait a minute. What I’m seeing while examining this person doesn’t match these numbers.” Or “there’s more going on here than what I see in the numbers.”

That’s what a human physician, with years of training, will be able to do. I can’t see a computer being able to do that. Instinct or even a gut feeling just doesn’t work in the computer world. No matter how many calculations that they can perform, and even given that AI can learn, they just will not have the neural network to be able to do that. In addition to that, how do you program empathy? How can you have confidence in something that’s not real?

One more thing: How do you program, or in this case, teach a machine to ask why something doesn’t make sense? Riley can ask me that question a hundred times in a day, but a machine? How can they learn to do that?

For as something as complicated as this human body is, with trillions and more of interactions, we can use the best data possible. Let’s leave that to the machines because that’s what they can do. And other than cases where people are too remote to see a live doctor, let’s leave healthcare diagnosis and treatments to humans.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

References: Fast Company. October 2019.

Online Prescriptions? Good Grief!

/in /by

If you listen to the radio, surf the Internet, or watch television, you might have heard a pitch for a discreet way to treat sexual problems, hair loss, even depression and anxiety: just visit their website. These are not pitches for supplements or other non-traditional treatments; they’re for medications that can fix your problem.

Don’t you need a prescription for those? Yes, and you can have a confidential chat online with a physician to get one for the solution to your problem. The “examination” may just be the answers to a few questions about your health or more detailed if the issue is more complex. But when it’s done, you get the prescription and can order it for discrete delivery, right to your door.

Online medical examinations? No. They’re simply a review of symptoms in order sell you a medication. What could go wrong? We don’t know yet because there’s no research that’s examined the issue. If a man wants a drug for erectile dysfunction and isn’t truthful about medications or cardiac issues, that could prove to be fatal. There are also problems with non-traditional uses for medications such as using a beta-blocker, typically prescribed for high blood pressure, for performance anxiety. Again, what could go wrong? So, so much.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

References: Fast Company. October 2019.

Now There’s Mobile Dental Care

/in /by

When I travel, I get to read more including some of the business magazines. Over this last weekend, I read three separate articles related to healthcare and the way it’s being delivered using today’s technology. I have teeth cleaning scheduled for today, so I’ll begin with dental care.

How would you like to have the dentist show up where you work to provide regular dental check-ups, basic dental care including x-rays, teeth-whitening, and teeth alignment? All in the comfort of massage chairs and an entertainment center while the dental professionals work on your teeth. That’s what a company called Henry the Dentist provides in eight mobile dental offices.

The premise is simple. The mobile dental offices can save the company lost productivity as employees don’t have to take hours off to see the dentist. From the employee perspective, it may force them to actually see the dentist, something most people seem to want to avoid—I don’t know why, because there’s nothing like the feeling of freshly cleaned teeth.

Because there’s a link between dental problems and many diseases (heart and kidney disease, diabetes, dementia, rheumatoid arthritis, and premature birth), the possibility for improving overall health is tremendous. The mobile offices can go to any location including senior citizen centers, churches, or anywhere a large enough group of people want convenient dental care.

On Thursday, we’ll switch to another aspect of health that might not have the same positive health implications as this one.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

References:
1. Inc. July/August. 2019
2. https://henrythedentist.com