not suggesting ‘wellness’ is a nice idea if you want a happier life. I believe it’s a ‘life or death’ choice that cannot remain unchallenged. As a nation, we are living longer lives but not better ones. We are adding years with the use of pharmaceuticals and medical intervention rather than assuming personal responsibility for the daily decisions that have direct impact on our lifelong physical health.
“…we are living longer lives but not better ones.”
As a nation, we need to re-think how we spend our healthcare dollar. Let’s challenge the policy that affords lives healthcare services only to prevent specific sickness or treat those with injury and pain. This is proven to be a narrow and ineffective strategy in isolation. Instead, we need to proactively shift our resources and attention to promoting a full scale change in lifestyle activities that encourage the pursuit of true wellness, and so ensure emerging generations will perform at their peak.
Beat the Escalator I’ve often shared with my clients that their state of physical well-being can be likened to riding a downward-moving escalator. Generally speaking, all things organically move from a state of health to a state of disorder (2nd Law of Thermodynamics). If you intentionally eat a lousy diet, refuse to exercise, smoke tobacco, drink excessive amounts of alcohol and form other obvious high-risk habits —then it only gets worse. It’s like actively walking down the steps, at a speed that outpaces the natural rhythm of the escalator, to reach the bottom more quickly where your health is in accelerated decline. Most people would acknowledge this lifestyle choice is a form of self-destruction, however subtle it may feel or look at the time. What is less intuitive, however, is that if you stand still on the same escalator and do nothing - adopting the passive approach to health - then you will still slowly regress to the same end point because the escalator is moving downward. This is the great deception for many.
Unfortunately, true wellness can only be achieved by persistently walking (jogging, skipping, hopping, jumping, running, sprinting, cycling, swimming, dancing) up the escalator at a speed that at least matches, if not outpaces, its inherent downward momentum. It takes discipline and intent to ‘beat the escalator’ - two attributes that deter most of us immediately. However, it can be done.
I’ve watched my 3 boys literally beat the escalator. At the local shopping centre, they raced from me and leaped and giggled all the way to the top of a downward moving belt, only to turn around in preparation to do it all over again. I recall fondly the great horror of the elderly bystanders who muttered something about ‘neglectful parenting’ on the kids’ third lap. I would have probably intervened, but I was too pre-occupied mentally rehearsing my own ascent.
The truth is, a healthy lifestyle is meant to be fun. Make the paradigm shift today and achieve wellness for the long term by actively pursuing it. I will teach you that beating the escalator is much easier than you think, and it doesn’t have to feel like work. Let’s not wait until a medical problem arises to think about your health. Consider it every day from now on. Live with positive intent to move well. It will prevent injury, minimise sickness, reduce lifestyle risks, gear-shift you out of passive health and catapult you onto the journey toward optimal wellness.
The Deception of pain In our busy lives, we learn to selectively ignore many things. Rude drivers. Lazy co-workers. Traffic jams. Telemarketers. Sometimes even our own screeching children! But we can’t ignore nagging pain. It’s too personal. As much as you try to focus on something else, it’s still there. Nudging, poking or viciously stabbing. When the pain gets unbearable or starts to compromise their lifestyle, generally people seek professional help. This is when our practice telephones start to ring.
“The danger with using pain alone as a reliable indicator of injury or sickness, (is that) more often than not it’s a delayed signal, and therefore already too late.”
Pain occurs when the brain gets sensory input from other parts of the body that are damaged or compromised in some way. From wherever the problem originated, an SOS call is made to the brain, triggering the emotive pain response to catch your attention and change what you are doing. Unless you have been involved in acute trauma, pain is generally not a sudden reaction but the result of an enduring problem that gradually builds over time. This phenomenon demonstrates the danger with using pain alone as a reliable indicator of injury or sickness, as more often than not it’s a delayed signal and therefore already too late.
Consider also, that in some severe strains and sprains, it’s not uncommon for the person to feel little or no pain because the nerve endings are completely torn, disconnecting sensory input to the brain. Ironically, the damage may be so bad that it actually requires surgical repair, despite the client feeling very little discomfort.
Pain can also be unreliable when therapists have provided early treatment or medication that has helped to relieve its intensity. Clients can be deceived into thinking that their reduction in pain correlates with recovery of their injury. Whilst therapists all over the world are experts in helping manage or resolve symptoms such as pain, this should never be mistaken for ‘healing’. As a physiotherapist I can influence many things, but the body still has a natural healing process with which I must synchronise and cooperate with.
Different people also have different pain tolerances. From the very stoic to the more sensitive amongst us, we can’t always rely on our feelings of pain to be an accurate interpretation of the extent of trauma or damage. The feeling of pain is also often modulated by unrelated emotions. For instance, pain can feel disproportionately worse when you are tired, disappointed or depressed. Alternatively, those who are highly focused on an activity or excited by some other event can experience a temporary reduction in pain.
I often remind my clients at the end of every consultation that the absence of pain does not equate to an absence of injury. Like a paper-cut to your fingertips, the pain eases long before the skin heals. In the same way, often clients with internal injuries are still recovering long after their pain disappears, and so need to be very careful with their movements to avoid exacerbating their injury. An experienced physiotherapist will factor pain into the overall treatment regime, but not overstate it as the only sign of recovery. They will form a sound diagnosis on the integration of numerous assessments and observations to formulate a comprehensive recovery strategy for optimum results.
“The absence of pain does not equate to an absence of injury”
My clear message is not to wait for pain before you pay attention to your health. Otherwise, you give the insidious nature of declining health and progressive micro-tissue damage an unfair head start that results in far greater deterioration than should ever be tolerated.
Get Behind the Wheel I have a good friend who is fanatical about his car. He uses filtered water to clean it every week and follows every manufacturer guideline for regular maintenance. He is fully invested into getting the most from his beloved vehicle. But when I talk to him about his health, he shrugs me off and tells me he feels fine.
“Fine?”
That’s just another way of him telling me he’s not sick or is living in the passive neutral zone just waiting to hit the health skids.
My friend pays meticulous attention to every sound his car makes, the quality of the tread on each tyre and knows by heart when he last changed the oil. But can he recall when he had his last physical? He knows the correct air pressure for his tyres, but doesn’t know his own blood pressure.
Why is it that so many of us are like this? We invest time and money into maintaining our vehicles — pumping in the right fuel, changing the oil and filters, rotating
