Am I in pain because I'm getting old... or is it because of my body's posture?

I don't believe for a second that it's because you're getting old.

Have you heard of the Egoscue method?  It's by far the best method I have found to correct posture problems.  Pete Egoscue has written many books on living pain free and now has partnered with a youtube channel called liveSomina.  I created this playlist for you.

I believe Pete Egoscue has the best methodology to relieve pain.  I have personally seen tremendous changes in myself.  I am glad they are creating this series where they follow a person who suffers with chronic pain and show his progress week by week of using the Egoscue pain free method.

Click here to go to the playlist.  I have attached the first episode to this blog post.

I'd love to hear your comments on this.  Especially if you've already tried the Egoscue method previously.  :)  Tell me what worked for you!

Posture: Is your spine shape normal, or the norm?

I started having lower back pain about a year ago. I think it started from picking up my little 10 pound miniature pinscher from my high chair without keeping the proper form.  However it started, it never really went away, until now (knock on wood).

I had tried everything: Chiropractor, massage, relaxation, yoga, hot tub, another chiropractor, egoscue e-cises, physical therapy, MRI, neurosurgeon consult, a third chiropractor, functional movement training, everything, and the pain did not go away. I was told I had arthritis and I just had to learn to live with it.

Then my dear Dr. Hotchner , seeing my desperation, suggested I read Esther Gokhale's book 8 Steps to a Pain Free Back.  I borrowed a copy at my local library.

The book makes sense.  It is very informative, has novel ideas, yet not so good in explanation of the method. The premise of the book is great.  Basically it reveals that there are some 'ancient' cultures where people spend their days doing what we would call backbreaking work, yet hardly have any incidents of back pain. The book is filled with inspiring pictures showing the contrast between the way people in those ancient cultures sit, stand, lie, sleep, and bend over, compared to how we do it today in Western societies.  The differences are striking.  What most impressed me was a juxtaposition of two spine images, taken from two different medical books, one from before 1920 and the other from around 1970.  Both images were supposed to show what a 'normal' spine looked like, except that they were so different from each other!  The spine image from before 1920 had more of a 'J' shape while the more modern one had more of an 'S' shape.  If these pictures were based on the average person, I thought, I can understand why we now have more back pain.  Our bad postural habits have even altered the way our spine is shaped.

In the picture below, Esther shows one of the correct ways to sit.  Notice how her spine is straight, not curved in either an 'S' or a 'C' shape.  Plus, she's bending forward form the hips, not from the waist. When I sit this way I don't feel any pressure on the lower back.

Even though her book and the premise are extraordinary, it's difficult to follow the instructions of how to adopt the different lilfestyle changes she suggests based solely on the book explanations.  I tried searching for some more instructions in youtube (as you know, if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a billion words), to no avail.  BUT I did sign up on their website for their newsletter, and voila!

A week into having read the book, I got my first newsletter, and there it was.  An invitation to attend a class near me where I could learn the Gokhale method in person with one of their trained instructors.  That was even better than a youtube video, so I immediately signed up, thinking I really had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

I can't tell you that I have 'perfect' posture now, but I can tell you that my back pain has improved tremendously. Look at the picture below of how I used to bend over to pick something off the floor and how I do it after the class.

So my back pain has gone away.  Now if I could only do something about my hip pain!  ;)

Can aging be stopped with exercise?

As we grow older, we tend to lose mobility.  One of the ways I like to compare and contrast our capability to do things is to watch children.  When was the last time you crawled under a table, tried to climb a tree or tried to do a cartwheel?  We all used to be able to do these things.  Why can't we now?  When did we stop?

Did we stop moving because we got old?  Or did we get old because we stopped moving?

I am a computer programmer and sit in front of my computer for hours on end.  what is that doing to my body?  It's training my sitting muscles of the hips and atrophying everything else.

As we age, we tend to become more sedentary and limit our range of motion.  Eventually we can't even walk straight.

As many of you know, my 82 year old mother lives with me.  I have seen her going through her aging process and feel it is a blessing, as I could be looking at a reflection of my aging process, and I can prepare for it.  As time has gone by, I started watching as her gait was not as straight as before.  One of her doctors suggested a book by Pete Egoscue called The Egoscue Method of Health through Motion. That book started us in a path we are still on and will be the subjects of other posts.

Egoscue happened to have a clinic in Palm Beach, and every month my mom gets evaluated, does an Egoscue workout, and goes home with instructions on exercises to do for that month.  I can physically see the difference that these sessions make in only one hour.  She will walk in with difficulty and a little crooked, and walk out much loser, walking straight and with better balance.

So get active!  Get moving!  Take a break from the computer every 30 minutes or so!  Crawl on the floor, hang from a tree!  Have fun!

Joint Arthritis

I know I will suffer from osteoarthritis in my old age.  How do I know it?  Because all of the elders in my family suffer from it.  My mother, who lives with me, definitely has joint arthritis, especially in the hands.  My uncle has it on the knees, I've even began to feel it mostly on the joints in my fingers.

I remember growing up and looking at my grandmother's hands.  They were very swollen looking and deformed, and she would always complain from pain.  My mom is now the same age as my grandmother would have been when I had those memories, but she's not nearly as bad as I remember grandma.

What is arthritis?  From what I understand it's mainly inflammation of the joints.  It could be hereditary or caused by injury or overuse.  And the bad news is it has no cure.  You just have to learn to live with it.  Or so I'm told.

So potentially we can have arthritis on any joint in our bodies.  From our toes to our neck.  My goal in my aging gracefully process would be to find out how to keep mobility without pain well into my golden years.

What works for arthritis depends on who you ask.  For many years my mom took glucosamine sulfate and it really helped, until it didn't.  NSAIDS (non-steroidal anti inflamatory drugs) like Advil and tylenol can also help because of the inflamation, but they do have side effects.  I've noticed with my mom that when she takes ibuprofen she also immediately gets edema (storing extra fluid in the lower extremities).  I've also tried MSM, burdock, and gotu kola, with mixed results.

Since it is inflamatory, perhaps a diet where you reduce the intake of foods that cause inflamation would be beneficial, but it seems to me that those vary per person.

I'm lucky that so far I've only experienced joint arthritis in two fingers of my right hands. I'm in the process of trying to notice why some mornings it seems to be worse than others.  Maybe what I ate the night before?  whether or not I exercised?  If I come up with any answers I'll be sure to post them.

About Dementia

I am 45 years old.  I'm too young to have dementia... or am I?  My mother, who is a healthy 82 year old woman, lives with me, and that's been a very eye-opening experience for my own aging process.  My mother has started to have noticeable symptoms of dementia.  I say 'noticeable' because at first I was the only one who noticed.  The doctors and my mom were in denial.

The difficulty with dementia is diagnosing the cause.  Is it hereditary?  Dietary?  Hormonal?  Normal part of the aging process? Will it mean you will get alzheimers?

Because of what I see my mother go through, I've been doing my own research.

One of my mother's doctors specializes in geriatrics.  When I mentioned to him that I was noticing signs of forgetfulness in my mother's daily behavior, he brought in an internist who performed a test.

The test consisted of answering simple questions.  Most of them my mom passed with flying colors:  Her name, where we were, what date it was (although she said 1912 instead of 2012), etc.

The difficult part was when she was asked to draw the face of a clock, and to make it show a time of twenty minutes to five.

My mom diligently drew a circle, drew the 12 on the top, a 6 on the bottom, and then I watched as she thought about what she wanted to do next.

She kept hovering over where the 3 would be, but wouldn't write it in.

After a long pause, the internist said "just draw so it's twenty to five".  My mom just stared at the page.  Finally, in frustration, she painted a 5 where the 3 should be, and pointed an arrow to it.  She said in apologetic frustration "I don't know how to do it.  I give up".  I felt really sorry for her.

Since then I've gotten all types of advice from doctors and well-intentioned friends.  Everything from cooking and ingesting lots of coconut oil to putting my mom on bio-identical hormone replacement therapy.  The geriatric doctor recommended a drug called Namenda.  The alternative medicine doctor said Namenda doesn't work and recommended the HRT.

For now my journey continues in search of what to do about dementia.  What to do about the dementia my mother is experiencing, and what I can do to diagnose/prevent my own.

Period cycles

I went to my gynecologist two days ago for my annual routine checkup.  As usual she asked me for the date of my last menstrual cycle.  I am a fairly organized person and I try to keep tabs of things I 'should' remember (dementia perhaps already?) on my google calendar.  That's when I noticed that I had had my period twice this month.  Once on the 2nd, and one on the 23rd.  This struck me as odd, since all of my life I've had (almost) perfectly regular 28 day period cycles, like clockwork.  Now it was only 21 days in between cycles.

So I asked my doctor about it.  Her answer?  "Menopause".  As simple as that.  In one sweeping word she expressed what I perhaps already knew but didn't want to acknowledge.  I am beginning to show the first signs of menopause. Changing period cycles.

So I guess I can officially say that I 'began' menopause at age 45, one month before my 46th birthday, which was the first  time I noticed a change in my period cycles.

Documenting the aging process

I've been thinking about writing a blog on the aging experience for a long time now.  This is my very first post.  As of today I am 45 years old and feel pretty good.  I plan on documenting the changes I notice in myself and those around me as I age.  I welcome your comments on your aging process as well.  "Aging with dignity" my always is famous for always answering to questions on her health.