Consumerism At Its Finest

Body Parts for Sale

Medical procedures that should be reserved for last resort situations have become commonplace “solutions” to musculoskeletal pain.  Physicians in a rush to embrace new technology have forgotten what country doctors knew intuitively, that the design of the human body is not flawed; Given the opportunity the body can, in most cases, heal itself.  Patients, in a hurry to eliminate pain, would prefer to take a pill or undergo surgery rather than make necessary lifestyle changes that would allow the body to heal itself.  The shoulder hurts, the knee hurts, the hip hurts:  Remove the appropriate joint and bolt on another.  But what if the source of the pain was not at the site of the pain?  What if the shoulder hurt because the hips were misaligned?  Will the pain return somewhere else?  What body part will you replace next? Pete Egoscue says that of the hundreds of patients he sees in his clinic who have had joint replacements, ALL of them would have been better off with a less traumatic, alternative treatment, with the single exception of accident victims whose joints were DESTROYED.

Loss of cartilage is often the rationale used to justify joint replacement.  Yet the body is not given a fixed amount of cartilage that when used up will not be replaced.  Given a chance, the body will replace the cartilage scraped away by misalignment.  We grow hair and fingernails and replace dead cells throughout our bodies everyday.  “The only reason to think that cartilage is permanently lost is that the dysfunction  that wears away the tissue in the first place is allowed to be permanent.”  The cartilage does not regenerate because it continues to be worn down faster than it is being built up.  Removing the dysfunction, restoring lost functions and maintaining them with prescribed exercises done each day will give the body the chance it needs.  Sounds pretty simple doesn’t it?  But artificial knees and hips and shoulder joints are state-of-the-art medicine with high price tags, so they must be a better solution, right?  Wrong.

So, how did we get here, to this place where the majority of us willingly accept and believe that replacing one of our joints with man-made materials is the only solution?  The answer is not a simple one but if we don’t at least start exploring it, human beings as a species are in serious trouble.  The technological advancements that have taken place in the last 100 years have changed our lives dramatically.  Everywhere you look there are new laborsaving devices, which we welcome as things that will make life “easier”.  What we have failed to notice is that our bodies are crying out to us for more motion, the motion that allowed us to not only survive for a few million years, but to successfully multiply and prosper.  The cries may be fatigue, anxiety, sleeplessness, headaches, leg cramps, stiffness and eventually pain.  Disconnected from our bodies, unable to understand the messages being communicated, we take a pill or look for some immediate way to silence the alarm, rather than solve the real problem, lack of adequate motion.   We have allowed ourselves to be lulled into a belief that the same human design that got us to 2012 is now “too frail to withstand the punishing onslaught of a desk chair without the benefit of drugs, surgery, or machines.”

 

Good health is not a product you can buy.  It requires personal responsibility that begins with learning to listen to your body, and identifying the dysfunctions and compensations that are present.  This knowledge and a daily dose of proper motion provided by Egoscue Method “e-cises” will set you on a path to a pain free, motion filled life.

YOUR HEALTH IS IN YOUR HANDS!

Suzanne

*Based on Pete Egoscue’s book, The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion