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KNEE CAP PAIN AND CRUNCHING
I feel compelled to write about knee cap pain again. Many of you have already read my earlier blog on this subject. It was my very first post! Do Not Do Squats Today I saw 6 women in my office with knee cap pain and crunching. All but one had been participating in supervised exercise routines which made squats, deep knee bends and lunges the backbone of the program. Women have a physical predisposition to having pain around their knee caps. It has to do with the shape of our pelvis. We were put together for having babies but not so much for running stairs and doing squats. And in…
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A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens Brown paper packages tied up with strings These are a few of my favorite things… Over the years I have collected a list of items I often recommend that my patients purchase. I’m going to go through a few of those items as we go into the holiday season, because they would make great gifts and stocking stuffers. And there’s nothing that says you can’t get one of these things for yourself! I own every one of them. I’ve already mentioned Bucky Eye Shades in my blog on Sleep Deprivation. Blocking out extraneous light is a…
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GET MORE SLEEP
Why do we yawn? It’s probably not because we’re bored. How often do you yawn because you’re bored? We take in more oxygen when we yawn. Maybe we need more oxygen. I believe yawning was a signal we developed before we used language. It might have been a way to show our teeth before fighting. Have you ever noticed that you sometimes yawn when you’re nervous? I always thought I yawned before a test because I was tired after staying up all night. I thought I yawned before surgery while I was in residency because I had been on call the night before, and yet I wasn’t actually tired.…
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FEAR OF NEEDLES
I’m a doctor. I give shots. It doesn’t bother me to give shots…not one iota. But you know what? I am a freak when it comes to getting shots. Oh you might smugly say, “The doctor doesn’t like it when the shoe’s on the other foot.” But let me tell you, it doesn’t bother me to break my arm or blow out my knee. It doesn’t bother me to have babies. It doesn’t bother me to get thrown off horses…too much. But I can’t handle getting a measly shot. I haven’t taken a flu shot in 5 years. Six years ago someone talked me into getting one…for the first and…
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I LEARNED ABOUT STIFFNESS IN ANATOMY LAB
One of the most common complaints I hear from patients is that they experience pain in transitions; going from sitting to standing, standing to sitting, getting out of chairs, getting out of bed. Now let me say, I never hear that complaint from 20 year olds. I only hear it from those over forty. I often recall my old days in medical school anatomy class when my patients ask me why they begin falling apart sometime after forty. I remember so clearly the first day we were “introduced” to our cadavers. It was so amazing on so many different levels, the first and most significant of which was simply the fact…
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DO NOT DO SQUATS!
I’m going to go ahead and post this blog. It’s going to make a lot of people mad. I posted it on my group’s blog (www.texasorthopedics.com) and we got more responses to it than any we’ve previously posted. And they were all negative! The exercise industry is highly invested in squatting. You just have to look at a health magazine to see that about every 10 pages has an ad or a column or a device incorporating the use of some variety of squat. My physician assistant and I keep a running tally on the number of patients I see every day in my clinic who have knee…
