Category Archives: therapy info

Muscle micro trauma II

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In many regards slow and steady really does win the race, whether you are trying to become more flexible or stronger remaining well balanced and in control when you exercise or work is important. “Form” is a term used in the fitness industry that defines the best posture and way of moving when you exercise. Good form reduces the risk of workout misadventures such as losing your balance and overstraining both of which can cause muscle micro trauma.

Time tested and proven exercise regimes such as Yoga and Tai Qi exercise your body in a very controlled and focused way that takes your muscles through the full range of their natural movement. The opposite way of using your muscles tends to traumatise them- short, jerky and highly repetative movements builds a type of friction up inside the muscle that is not healthy or sustainable.

Repetative strain injuries (RSI) are caused by using your muscles in such a way, you may get away with it for a long time because the natural pain killing effects of your endorphins and encephalins mask the pain, but sooner or later it will get you.

Ignoring the muscular symptoms earlier on will make you more likely to get tendon and joint problems later  which are much harder and more expensive to fix. You may do data entry all day on a computer, sort mail, dig trenches or even play a musical instrument, all these activities and many more that require repetative short muscular movements can give you muscle micro trauma.

It is useful to think of a rope fraying, one fibre at a time breaking until a relatively small force makes it suddenly tear the rest of the way. Micro muscle trauma can do the same thing. If you are required to do short ranged repetitive tasks with your work try sharing the work load between both your hands.

Sacrificing good form to perform personal best reps is not worth it.

On any fresh muscle trauma ice packs can give you good instant relief and anti inflammatories can suppress the symptoms too, as can stretching provided of course that your symptoms will still allow you to do so. By the time you know that you have a repetitive stain injury caused by muscle micro trauma the chances are that it has been going on for quite some time before you can no longer ignore the symptoms.

It is for this reason that you must be patient and consistent for therapy and preventative measures to start showing results. It doesn’t matter whether it is physio therapy, osteopathy, acupuncture or massage or combinations of these or similar therapies you must be consistent and follow the advice of your therapist, it is unfair (and unintelligent) to think they have failed if your symptoms do not improve immediately.

The good news is that muscle micro trauma is treatable and preventable.

Plantar Warts

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Warts are caused by the human papillomavirus and they can occur anywhere on the body. There are 10 varieties of warts and as many as 130 varieties of papillomavirus. Many people get warts  as children (mainly simple warts) and lose them inexplicably as they approach puberty. Genital warts on the other hand are thankfully rare in children and are passed on through sexual contact between adults.

Plantar warts occur on the sole of your foot and the underside of your toes and they can be a real nuisance, they can be a type of mosaic clustered wart or a simple single wart. If you firmly press a wart anywhere on your body it would feel uncomfortable and therein lies the problem with plantar warts, everytime you stand up there is firm pressure on them.

Fortunately there are a variety of off -the- shelf products that are reasonably cheap and highly effective against plantar warts, if you or your children get them you should use these products as soon as you can because the wart can progressively get bigger and more painful if you leave them be.

There is another problem with plantar warts too, they can affect the way you walk, stand and run. This happens because you move your feet and stand in a way that removes pressure from that part of your foot so you can avoid pain. This may cause inflammation to another part of your foot sole through over use and even make you prone to twisting your ankle because of how it effects your stride.

This was all brought home to me recently when my daughter kept twisting her ankle when she played sport. A plantar wart under her right big toe that had previously been unsuccessfully treated got bigger and the bigger it got the more she turned her left ankle.

Sometimes larger warts take more than one treatment so that is what we did (always use products according to manufacturers advice) and for several weeks now she has not twisted her ankle again.

Now that you know what the secondary effects of plantar warts can be you can avoid them through promptly treating them but when you don’t know you may not be able to see the cause and effect and it can make other things worse like your ankles. It is an example of the compensatory effect in action, just like a sore knee can cause back pain and a sore shoulder can give you neck pain.

Sometimes adults can baulk at getting them “burnt off” by the doctor because burning sounds painful but this does not need to be the case. The product that I used on my daughter’s foot caused her no distress atall, it was a cold spray applied with a cotton bud, other off the shelf wart treatments come in the form of ointments that are shielded from the surrounding healthy skin by barrier dressings. The sprays seem to be more effective on larger warts but the ointments work on smaller plantar warts quite well. Warts can recur, if they do you treat then again.

Arthritis and Diet

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There are many in the alternate medicine community who advocate diet therapy for the treatment of arthritis, two of the best known ones are the alkaline diet and the nightshade -free diet. Orthodox medicine for the most part considers these therapies at best ineffective and at worst quackery. Fortunately you can safely try these therapies for yourself and see if they work as well for you as others have claimed they have for themselves.

The alkaline and nightshade-free diets may or may not work for you but pharmacuetical medications may not either and best of all you can do both if you like.

The alkaline diet as it’s name suggests, is aimed at lowering the body’s acidity, the rationale is that the body becomes more acidic when there is inflammation in it.

The nightshade -free diet is about eliminating foods in the solanaceae (nightshade) family because people with sensitivities or allergies to them are, it is claimed, more likely to get an inflammatory response when they eat them. Nightshade crops include capsicum, egg plant, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes and tamarilloes.

It is important that with either diet you are not lacking essential vitamins and minerals, for instance if you love tomatoes and normally you get most of your vitamin C from them and then eliminate tomatoes  from your diet,  you must get your vitamin C from elsewhere. This does not mean that you have to stock up on expensive suppliments,  just choose a healthy balance from the foods that you can have.

If you are going to find out if a dietary approach to your arthritis is going to work or not, being consistent is important and so is trying it long enough to show some results. If it makes you feel worse stop it.

If you are on pharmaceutical medication don’t mix it with herbal medication without consulting a pharmacist as they can react with one another, elimination diets and medicines should not be confused with one another.

There is nothing wrong with doing your own research by reading and listening to different ideas and opinions, the quality of online information is improving all the time because the demand for self-help knowledge is there. The popularity of cooking shows and the plethora of cook books now available shows that people want to eat real wholesome food- not many diets, recommend processed foods including those listed above.

Unfortunately arthritic conditions can recur, the older you get the more things break down and your body become less tolerant to mistreatment. Whether it is rheumatiod or psoriatic arthritis, PMR, fibromyalgia or some other auto immune condition causing your inflammation learn all you can about it once you get it properly diagnosed.

You wouldn’t put kerosene into your car so please show your stomach some respect and eat well.

Iron Overload

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About 1 in every 300-400 people of white Northern European ancestry (one in 600-800 in coloured populations)  suffer from a hereditory disease that can dangerously store up too much iron in your body, it is called haemachromatosis (pronounced: he-ma-crow-ma-toe-sis) or Iron Overload (I.O.). It is kind of like the opposite of anaemia where you have too little iron in your body though strangely enough they do share some similar symptoms such as lethargy and weakness.

Even though only about 1 in 300 people get it I.O., one in 7 carry the gene  making it one of the most common hereditory diseases. When you have I.O. too much iron is absorbed from your diet and gets stored mainly in your liver and your joints,  unfortunately your body can’t squirt it out when it gets too much and left untreated it can make you sick and shorten your life.

This is a great shame because when it is detected early it is easy to fix, you don’t even need drugs or surgery. One of the big problems is getting I.O. diagnosed in the first place, it effects men earlier than women (30 to 60 years) and it shares many symptoms with other diseases, apart from lethargy these may include abdominal pain, arthritis (especially in the first two fingers), hair loss, forgetfulness, jaundice, mood swings and extreme irritability.

I.O. left untreated can give you liver cirrosis, impotence, diabetes and heart disease, it can be misdiagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia even though it is really simple to confirm with a blood test.

Your liver can be a very robust organ but when it’s had enough you can find out very suddenly and dramatically, when you have I.O. this might come about after a big boozy night that can give you the mother of all hang overs.( Alcohol does not mix well with I.O.) It may be several days after you have had that big night out and you still feel shattered then your doctor might give you that blood test that finally picks up your I.O.

Blood letting has gone out of fashion since the middle ages to treat most things but not I.O., infact it is the only way of treating it directly. This can happen in the form of a phlebotomy or venesection which are identical procedures to donating blood. When 500 mls (one pint) of blood is taken  with a regularity in proportion to the iron levels in your body over time, those nasty things that can happen to your liver, pancreas, heart and sex life can be completely avoided.

As always there are things you can do to help yourself manage I.O., avoiding alcohol,  going easy on  red meat consumption, raw seafood such as oysters are particularly hazardous, dark chocolate may not agree with you and taking iron or vitamin C supplements are out too. Vitamin C from fresh fruit is ok though.

Pretty unusual sounding disease isn’t it? I.O. can even set off metal detectors!, it is good for one thing though, it will make you a regular blood donor, it will make you a giving person even if you don’t want to be.

Ganglions and Bakers’ cysts

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The word ganglion basically means a collection of bundled tissue and it occurs in nerve tissue and the tissues surrounding your joints such as tendon and synovium (the smooth  lining of your joints). In  neurology a ganglion can be a naturally occuring essential structure in nerve tissue that acts like a nerve junction or it is an unexplained thickening of nerve tissue that may or may not result from trauma and serves no useful purpose.

The other type of ganglion (simple) is a benign tumour that occurs in tendons and synovium. Not all reference sources define ganglion the same way, for instance some authorities claim that  simple ganglion are idiopathic (has no known cause) where others state that participating in high impact activities  make one much more susceptible to simple ganglion.

Most simple ganglion occur as bumpy nodules in the back of our wrists (about 80%) and you can get them on the top of your feet too (Mortenson’s neuroma). Playing handball, boxing, martial arts and heavy manual work can help form wrist ganglion and running, jumping and other forms of high impact exercise can help create foot ganglion.

Your genes probably play a part in the likelihood of getting ganglion and if you don’t want to wait for them to disappear of their own accord you can have them drained through a syringe (aspiration) or surgically excised. Aspiration is usually only a temporary solution as surgery can be if ALL of the cyst is not removed.

Simple ganglion are fairly common and usually do not produce distressing symptoms, if there is discomfort from them it is usually mild. Some people are put off by their appearance, wrist ganglion can reach the diameter of a 10 cent piece and were once known as “bible cysts” because an early remedy was to physically strike the back of the wrist with a thick book like a bible.

Sometimes this worked but other times they came back and needless to say the odd wrist probably got broken in the process too. Simple ganglion usually form between 20 and 40 years of age, they are semi- firm to the touch and can go away by themselves without explanation.

Occassionally Bakers’ cysts are referred to as ganglion too, Bakers’ cysts (BC) are found behind or beside the knee. Knee trauma is a possible precursor for BC and infection can do it too though usually it happens without apparent warning. In BC fluid builds up in the knee usually pouching out at the back, it is much more obvious when your leg is straightened or fully bent and is sometimes uncomfortable.

Like simple ganglion they often go away by themselves and usually do not cause people problems unless they track down to your calf muscle. Any process that can produce swelling in your knee can potentially cause a Bakers’ cyst. Simple ganglion and Bakers’ cysts can be an auto-immune response too. Sometimes ganglion can be mistaken for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) nodules but is thankfully not debiliating like RA is.

The old saying that “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” certainly can apply here, while some medical authorities state that there is nothing that can be done to prevent them others say that strong and flexible leg muscles can prevent Bakers’ cysts and treating your hands gently will help prevent wrist ganglion forming. There is a theory in Chinese medicine that people who hang onto their anger form more tumours and cysts than people who manage their anger well.