Category Archives: mind and body

Diet, Eating and TCM

There are numerous types of diet aimed at weight control and better digestive function but how and when we actually eat matters too. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), not only is the nutritional content in our food important but so too is eating in a peaceful setting, away from the work station and not thinking about anything that upsets us. In TCM it is thought that whatever we are thinking when we eat is swallowed with our food, that our digestive organs are more open and sensitive to emotional upset when we eat.

There are good physiological reasons why eating on the run is not good for us too. When we ingest food our digestive organs spring into action and need more of our circulating blood to power the digestive process, if we insist on being physically and/or mentally active while we eat, our muscles and brain actively compete with our bellies for more of our precious blood flow.

This is easy to prove to oneself, try eating identical meals in two different scenarios at the same time of day, what feels better between eating in peace and quiet with no distractions or answering the phone between mouthfuls as you hurriedly walk back from the take-away? Is it possible to enjoy what you eat when you are just “filling the hole” ? Do you think you might be more susceptible to indigestion eating this way? Is it really hygeinic dropping crumbs all over your work station? Recent health studies have shown that your PC keyboard has more germs on it than toilet seats do.

The failure to chew enough before swallowing makes it harder for food to be broken down by our digestive organs, poor posture crams our stomachs for space and insufficient exercise can make us more prone to constipation- there are many factors that effect our digestion. In TCM eating late at night is not considered ideal and meals are considered best when they all contain the “5 flavours” sour, sweet, spicy, salty and bitter.

We all need the same nutrients but a person with Crohn’s disease has to avoid gluten, the lactose intolerant need to avoid dairy, if you have haemachromatosis you should go lightly with your iron intake and most of us never drink enough water. Learning about our own idiosyncrasies is helpful if we want to live long and happy lives. If you do want to take suppliments it is better to get an expert opinion rather than self-diagnose and choose products that are properly absorbed in your alimentary tract, portaloo contractors often find piles of undigested tablets in the bottom of their tanks that have passed straight through their users.

One frequent area of disagreement between medical practitioners and natural doctors is the necessity of vitamin and mineral suppliments, doctors often say that suppliments are unnecessary because there are plenty of them in our food already but naturopaths may recognize their patient’s symptoms to signs of mineral and vitamin deficiency. They may both be right if the patient’s digestive tract just isn’t extracting what it should from the food they eat.

Keep an honest record of what you eat for a while and compare it to what nutritionists recommend and see what you come up with.

 

Occupational Health

It is relatively easier to spot potential safety hazards in a place like a building site than say a shopping centre for instance. On a construction site you might be hit by a falling object, become a falling object yourself, get injured by malfunctioning equipment,  have years of breathing in demolition dust or have something non-lethal like industrial deafness. Many die and are seriously injured every year in construction accidents.

The truth is that potential occupational health and safety hazards exist in all work places. Take sick -building- syndrome (SBS) for instance, a big part of SBS is inefficient and contaminated air conditioning systems, after about 20 years they  become very difficult if not impossible to keep bacteria and virus free. Buildings are literally constructed around air conditioning systems, to fully replace such a system can be enormously expensive which can make it completely impractical even if it is possible.

The main air con shafts that movie stars crawl through in action flicks divide into many narrower ribbed ducted tributaries that service smaller spaces- quite impossible to get in there and clean. Nowhere is this more serious than in our hospitals, infection control gets progressively more difficult mainly for this reason. Health ministers are either averse to publicly acknowledge this or more worryingly, they might not even know.

How many of us work in air conditioned buildings?

Some OH&S statistics are quite shocking and surprising, did you know nurses are more likely to get assaulted than police in their place of work?, particularly in casualty units on Friday and Saturday nights by drunk patients. Then their are stress issues affecting your health at work, during the implementation phase of the GST workers at the Taxation Office took record levels of stress leave because of the changes. More soldiers have died from suicide after returning from Afghanistan than who actually died in the field fighting because of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Occupational health and safety hazards take many forms.

I ponderered on numerous occassions what the healthiest occupation might be and I thought that being a Yoga teacher would go close, doing Yoga all day- what could be healthier than that? I thought that right up until I treated a Yoga teacher who told me that the yoga was fine but going around to each student trying to correct their technique was often quite difficult because of the awkward postures she would often find herself in doing this, especially in beginners classes.

If you do any job long enough and apply yourself to it, in some way it can undermine your health.

We have come a long way since child miners died of black lung and asbestos workers were expected to toil without protective gear but our new jobs have new OH&S challenges and we cannot rely on the workers compensation system to protect our interests like we used to. Changes to the Work Cover act several years ago has made compensation for work place injury and illness much harder than it once was, we really do have to take care of ourselves in the work place.

Aging- your Muscles and Joints

As we age our bodies go into decline, if we are smart though we will prepare for it with making appropriate lifestyle choices. Even if you have pushed your luck with drinking, smoking and not exercising you can improve on what’s left if you really want to. Whenever I say this to one of my massage clients I always think about a former businessman and client “T”. T retired at 60 overweight, flabby and short of breath from years of long boozy lunches and no exercise at all. Rather than carry on his self destructive path into retirement he got fit, very fit, much to the amazement of his friends he created a physique many 20 year olds would like to have.

What you need is a plan, even if you have been very fit in the past the same activity now may injure you, this is what T did. As cartilage wears down, our joints can’t absorb shock like they used too, even worse if you have had a cartilage injury that has never been that good since. Our joints don’t bend and straighten as they should when the adjacent muscle, ligament and tendon have weaknesses and have scar tissue also .

Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common musculo-skeletal condition which affects about 8% of the population over 55,  polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) affects people in the 50-70 year age group, adhesive capsulitis (Frozen Shoulder) affects people in 45-55 demographic, rheumatoid arthritis usually starts in the 40-60 year age group and osteoporosis is most often diagnosed in the 50+ age group. This is far from a definitive list of all the painful things that can slow you down and make you groan when you get out of bed of a morning and even a fit person can suffer from them but fit people recover faster and better.

The body requires some mild impact activity to help maintain bone density but high impact can cause you problems. This might be the difference between walking and running or between running on the road or on grass.

Massage and Self Massage, like good exercise are things we need increasing amounts of as we age if we wish to remain able bodied.

I worked in a nursing home for about 15 months and it left quite an impression on me, all those stiff bodies taking short shuffling steps. We think of this as normal because it is so common but it isn’t. I have personally known elderly people who are still flexible, energetic and mobile, they are not common but they do exist and are living proof that taking care of yourself does make a difference.

Part of the problem is that many health professionals only get to see old people who are sick, they never get to see the healthy ones. This creates negative expectations about aging, that sickness and weakness are synonymous with getting old. A person can be healthy and old for a long time before they decline, if everyone else gives up on you it is tempting to give up on yourself too….please don’t.

If your joints and muscles are getting stiffer please investigate the possible ways others can help you and you can help yourself. Think about what you love doing most and what you have to do to keep participating. Try some Self Massage.

 

 

Depression and Obesity

The University of Tasmania has  recently published research findings that link depression to obesity, not altogether surprising considering the much publicised growth of both diseases in recent times. Some people lose their appetite altogether when they are stressed out but others comfort eat, the foods comfort eaters choose usually are not fresh carrots and vitamin tablets but rather high calorie treats rich in fat and sugar.

Exercise can help with both problems but how do you get started? The best exercises in the world won’t help you if you can’t do them due to reasons like you cannot easily get down on the floor to do yoga or it has just been so long since you did last exercise that your body has really stiffened up and aches when you try to power walk or lift weights. It may be necessary to get a course of massage or osteopathy or chiropractic treatments before you take the next step to get fit.

Herein lies a big problem, over the last 20 years of doing body work in several  clinics obese people seem to be very under-represented considering how many of them there are now. It is possible that feeling embarrassed about their girth (particular if you are shy or lacking in confidence) might make an obese person hesitate about taking their shirt off infront of a total stranger. This is a great shame because there is a lot a good that a musculo-skeletal therapist can do to help you get started on the path to a healthier and fitter new-you. If this sounds like you or someone you know there are ways around this. Getting massaged with your clothes still on like you do when you get Chinese or Thai massage may make you feel more comfortable and less self-conscious than stripping down to your underwear for an oil-on-skin Swedish style massage.

There are some very worn-out fallacies about about being too fat to get a massage, EVERYBODY can benefit from being massaged not just slim athletic looking people. Sometimes when a person’s skin has become stretched tight because their girth has never been greater it can take more strength on the part of the massage therapist to get down to the muscle but anybody (and there are many) who does deep tissue massage should be able cope with this and if you are unsure just ring up and ask.

There are an increasing number of female only gyms and female only areas in regular gyms that can help girth-conscious women to feel more comfortable with exercising. If there are some exercises that you cannot do don’t let it stop you from doing the exercises that you can do, be careful not to go looking for excuses not to exercise because you don’t feel like exercising, 5 minutes exercise is better than no minutes exercise.

It is not just comfort eating (and drinking) and lack of physical activity that causes and worsens obesity, some medications such as anti depressants can increase your body weight and size too which may be part of the problem, don’t be shy about discussing the options with your doctor and explore how Self Massage may help you.

Massage and exercise can alleviate the symptoms of obesity by soothing muscles that have to work so hard carrying your body around and the feel good hormones released during massage and exercise can help both.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is a functional disease of the colon and is sometimes referred to as spastic colon. It has no specific known cause. It is diagnosed by exclusion, which means that there is no specific test for it as such, it is more a process of eliminating other possible diseases that leads to it’s diagnosis .

We do know that it’s main symptoms (diarrhea, constipation, abdominal pain and white mucous in excrement) are worsened by stress and eating fatty food though. When an IBS sufferer “gets the shits” that can be literally what happens,  IBS is a disease that is managed rather than cured.

If the above mentioned symptoms are not enough to make you serious about managing your IBS as well as you can, recent discoveries in immunology have thrown the digestive system in general, under a new and interesting spotlight. The more medical scientists have learned about the GIT (Gastro Intestinal Tract) the more convinced they are that it is a very important part of our physical immunity as well as our digestive system, pathogens are literally destroyed in a healthy gut. How this might specifically relate to IBS is not yet known but  it does give us yet another reason to eat well.

Another recent GIT study has located the presence of glial tissue in the small intestine. Previously glial tissue was thought to only exist in the brain, this discovery may well eventually lead to understanding better how and why our thoughts and feelings affect our digestion. On an intuitive level most of us suspect that stress effects digestion because how bad we can feel in the belly when we get really bad news or something important does not turn out how we envisaged.

As mentioned in other posts about stress, a sound strategy for how to control it is really helpful. Most of the quick fixes tend to have only short term value and certainly swallowing things like alcohol, drugs and comfort food into the same alimentary canal that is already under strain is not the best thing you can do to help your IBS.

If you live alone and do not see the point in cooking a decent meal just for one person (you), you are doing your guts no good.

It can be difficult to self-assess how well you cope with stress, maybe you are not as good at it as you think you are, get an unbiased opinion off someone whose judgement you trust and think about how it may be affecting your health.

IBS can be highly debilitating particularly if it’s cause cannot be readily removed or rectified, many find comforting fatty foods too hard to resist when they feel stressed and controlling stress itself is one of the great dilemmas of modern humanity. A mixture of self discipline and the ability to let go and let it all wash over you when you feel emotionally overwhelmed is a strategy worth trying if you have IBS. Please consider meditation, just the act of slowing your breathing can help your IBS by suppressing stress hormones.

Please do not overlook the possible relief that exercise and massage can make to your IBS symptoms.