Head Over Hips

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Hip health is hugely important to the rest of health, and this often becomes more of an issue as we get older.

  • Today’s main feature looks at hip osteoarthritis, and how the brain gets in the way of healing (in a misguided attempt to protect us)—and how to overcome that.

• Have you tried everything for sleep and still find yourself getting to sleep later than you’d like, and/or sleeping less soundly than you’d like?

  • Today’s sponsor Cornbread Hemp is offering a special deal on their gummies that combine organic CBD with lavender, valerian, and chamomile, for a synergistic soporific effect that’ll have you peacefully snoozing in no time, guaranteed (literally, they offer a guarantee).

• Today’s featured book teaches how to spot bad science being misrepresented in headlines, and how to not fall for the field of medicine’s “blind spots”.

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

Why You Can’t Just “Get Over” Trauma

Time does not, in fact, heal all wounds. Sometimes they even compound themselves over time.

Dr. Tracey Marks explains the damage that trauma does—the physiological presentation of “the axe forgets but the tree remembers”—and how to heal from that actual damage:

Prefer text? The above video will take you to a 10almonds page with a text-overview, as well as the video!

Wildcard Wednesday

Head Over Hips

We’ve written before about managing osteoarthritis (or ideally: avoiding it, but that’s not always an option on the table, of course), so here’s a primer/refresher before we get into the meat of today’s article:

Avoiding/Managing Osteoarthritis

When the head gets in the way

Research shows that the problem with recovery in cases of osteoarthritis of the hip is in fact often not the hip itself, but rather, the head:

See: People with hip osteoarthritis have reduced quadriceps voluntary activation and altered motor cortex function

This is a case of a short-term protective response being unhelpful in the long-term. If you injure yourself, your brain will try to inhibit you from exacerbating that injury, such as by (for example) disobliging you from putting weight on an injured joint.

This is great if you merely twisted an ankle and just need to sit back and relax while your body works its healing magic, but it’s counterproductive if it’s a chronic issue like osteoarthritis. In such (i.e. chronic) cases, avoidance of use of the joint will simply cause atrophy of the surrounding muscle and other tissues, leading to more of the very wear-and-tear that led to the osteoarthritis in the first place.

So… How to deal with that?

You probably can exercise

It’s easy to get caught between the dichotomy of “exercise and inflame your joints” vs “rest and your joints seize up”, which is not pleasant.

However, the trick lies in how you exercise, per joint type:

When Bad Joints Stop You From Exercising (5 Things To Change)

…which to be clear, isn’t a case of “avoid using the joint that’s bad”, but is rather “use it in this specific way, so that it gets stronger without doing it more damage in the process”.

Which is exactly what is needed!

Further resources

For those who like learning from short videos, here’s a trio of helpers (along with our own text-based overview for each):

• The Most Underrated Hip Mobility Exercise (Not Stretching)

• Overcome Front-Of-Hip Pain

• 10 Tips To Reduce Morning Pain & Stiffness With Arthritis

And for those who prefer just reading, here’s a book we reviewed on the topic:

11 Minutes to Pain-Free Hips – by Melinda Wright

Take care!

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This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between tilapia and cod—there was a clear winner here, and we picked the tilapia (click here to read about why), as did 36% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

One-Minute Book Review

Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health – by Dr. Marty Makary

From the time the US recommended not giving peanuts to infants for the first three years of life “in order to avoid peanut allergies” (whereupon non-exposure to peanuts early in life led to, instead, an increase in peanut allergies and anaphylactic incidents), to the time the US recommended not taking HRT on the strength of the claim that “HRT causes breast cancer” (whereupon the reduced popularity of HRT led to, instead, an increase in breast cancer incidence and mortality), to many other such incidents of very bad public advice being given on the strength of a single badly-misrepresented study (for each respective thing), Dr. Makary puts the spotlight on what went wrong.

This is important, because this is not just a book of outrage, exclaiming “how could this happen?!”, but rather instead, is a book of inquisition, asking “how did this happen?”, in such a way that we the reader can spot similar patterns going forwards.

Oftentimes, this is a simple matter of having a basic understanding of statistics, and checking sources to see if the dataset really supports what the headlines are claiming—and indeed, whether sometimes it suggests rather the opposite.

The style is a little on the sensationalist side, but it’s well-supported with sound arguments, good science, and clear mathematics.

Bottom line: if you’d like to improve your scientific literacy, this book is an excellent illustrative guide.

Click here to check out Blind Spots, and eliminate yours!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Wishing you a wonderful Wednesday full of wellness,

The 10almonds Team