Over two years, the injured knees were assessed using a comprehensive numerical score that rated pain, function during activity and other measures. At the time of the original injury, the knee also had been scored.

At the end of the two years, both groups showed considerable improvement. The scores for the surgically repaired knees had risen by 39.2 points. The scores for the more conservatively treated knees also had risen, by 39.4 points.

In other words, the outcomes were virtually identical. Despite a widespread belief that surgery leads to a stronger knee, the results showed that surgically reconstructing the A.C.L. as soon as possible after the tear “was not superior” to more conservative treatment, the study’s authors wrote.

To read the rest of the article, click here to head over to the New York Times.

The knee was designed to be a “smart” knee — meaning it would have software built in that would make it function like a real knee. It would be able to sense and react to movements so that it would move the way a regular (organically grown) knee does.

But there was a major problem when trying to program the software for the knees.

They had to try to get the knee to learn how the individual wearer walked so it could accurately predict when the person was going to, say, go up some stairs or step off a curb so that it could react accordingly.  But here was the problem.

The person wearing the knee never moved exactly the same way.

Once the knee had “learned” how the person moved, the person was already moving a different way. The position they slept in at night would change the way they walked.  Sitting for a while changed the way they walked. There was nothing that DIDN’T affect the way the person walked.

So the end result was that the smart knee’s software would get consistently confused and gradually lock up into the flexed position until it could be reset.

Not ideal.

The moral of the story is that it makes more sense to do as much as you can to keep the biological knee you’ve got before having it replaced with a smart knee or a dumb knee because no matter how good technology is, it’s extraordinarily hard to replicate the intricate system of coordination going in on your organically grown body!

Get your body working right. Keep your joints feeling right. Keep your OEM parts!

Think about this example. Your friend is lying in bed, sweating and coughing and complaining of congestion. His temperature is 103 degrees. He feels dizzy and weak and occasionally cold.

You would say he has a fever, right?

Now, would you say the fever is causing the headache? Would you say the fever is causing the intermittent feelings of cold? Would you say his hot forehead is caused by the fever?

It’s easy to let your tongue slip and say, “yeah, he has a headache from his fever” or “his forehead is hot because of his fever.”

But you’d be WRONG for the same reason diagnoses like “chronic fatigue syndrome” and “fibromyalgia” are wrong.

The reality is that a “fever” is just the name given to a set of conditions (namely, having a high temperature, feeling dizzy, getting chills, having a hot forehead, etc.). But that collection of symptoms isn’t caused BY the name. The name is just an easy way to refer to them as a group.  The fever is a phenomenon that’s caused by something else — an infection, generally.  It’s a symptom of something wrong.

Now I said that “chronic fatigue syndrome” and “fibromyalgia” are wrong.  Here’s what I mean.

The pain is a symptom of something wrong.  It isn’t the thing that is wrong.

But pain that is chronic, persistent, irritating, and consistent is starting to get names.  And those names make the pain sound like a disease.  And these pseudo-diseases are being treated as diseases to be managed with stronger pills and surgeries.

Chronic fatigue. Fibromyalgia. Regional pain syndrome.  Tennis elbow. Carpal tunnel.  Thoracic outlet.  These are all fantastic names.  Fabulous names, really, because they all sound so menacing.

What these names all have in common is that they are being used as disease diagnoses when they shouldn’t be.  None of these names even hints at the cause of the set of symptoms they describe.  Just look at the way they’re treated and discussed.

The same way fever doesn’t tell you the cause of the associated symptoms, the medical diagnoses for chronic fatigue syndrome doesn’t tell you the cause of your problem. Chronic fatigue doesn’t CAUSE you to be tired and in pain all the time.  Chronic fatigue is an easy name to refer to a situation where you’re in pain and tired all the time.  Now, lots of studies are done on the underlying physiology of the blood and the chemical levels and all that great fantastic stuff, but it’s all still just looking at a set of symptoms and hoping that addressing one of those symptoms will halt the progression of the other symptoms.  Since you don’t know the cause, all you can do is fuddle about with different treatments (mostly pills that disrupt the physiological changes that are happening).

Fibromyalgia doesn’t cause body-wide pain and tightness.  Fibromyalgia IS when your whole body hurts and you have lots of tightness. That doesn’t even begin to explain WHY everything hurts and is tight.  That’s a crucial, crucial distinction!  Without addressing the cause, all you can do is pop stronger pain pills to try to “manage” the disease…except the disease isn’t even a disease!  It’s a collection of symptoms.

Finally, take carpal tunnel.  Carpal tunnel doesn’t cause wrist pain.  Carpal tunnel IS wrist pain with impingement happening at the wrist.  But that still doesn’t tell you the cause of that impingement.  It just tells you that it’s happening, and that it’s also accompanied by pain.

That’s important for those who are now finding that carpal tunnel release surgery is only a temporary fix.

What’s important to note is that as chronic pain starts getting more and more names, people are getting more pills and more crazy surgeries. And yet the results are hit and miss or downright abysmal in terms of recovering quality of life.

Because of a simple misuse of words, these medical treatments aren’t treating diseases — they’re treating symptoms.  And the result is people with pain that never goes away and whose quality of life diminishes day by day.

It’s the diction of doom.  It’s like treating the fever without treating the infection.

What is it? Well, it’s when a bunch of things in your leg and into your hip joint are misaligned. Your knee rotates in, your lower leg rotates out, and your arch collapses.  But according to the medical community, there is an easy fix!  What is it?

According to this website, it’s a screw/bolt looking thing.  It looks like this:

from curemms.com

Now, yes, it does look like it can be had from Home Depot for 25 cents in the bottom drawer of aisle 17.  But what in the world would you do with that screw/bolt looking thing?

You would have it surgically implanted in your ankle!  Why? According to curemms.com:

realignment of the foot under the leg (elimination of excessive pronation, or flattening and turning out of the foot) is what is needed. The HyProCure® device is made to address this need.

So think about this.  Your hip joint gets out of alignment because of what’s happening at your ankle.  And apparently your ankle gets so under the influence of mysterious forces that you need a screw/bolt looking thing to stop it from getting out of line. Does that make sense?  At all?  Any?

That screw/bolt thing sounds like a quick fix to me (sort of…), but doesn’t it make more sense to be trying to reprogram the muscles of your body to align your bones better?  You know with some hard work, a little problem solving, some exercise?

That’s what I think.  That’s what my physical therapist client thinks.  But we are extremely biased.  And neither of us are trained surgeons, so take what we think with a grain of salt.

What do YOU think?

Look at what he accomplished after 6 days (yes, 6 calendar days) of 30 minutes of exercises that were tailored to his needs.

After only six days, "the Killer" made significant changes to his posture and pain.

There’s no posing or posturing for these pictures.  These are the real deal.  This guy simply did his exercises, made a small adjustment to the way he was sitting every day at the computer, and in one week, he made a huge change to both his relaxed standing posture and the recurring pain that was plaguing him.

Of course his posture’s not perfect yet, but the Killer is moving quickly in the right direction!

In super simple terms, that means that after surgery your shoulder still won’t do the things you know it should be able to do.

Not exactly a fantastic result, in my opinion, but apparently others think shoulder surgery might still have some use.

Here’s what Dr. Michael Bey, one of the doctors involved in the study, said about shoulder surgery:

Our study suggests that surgery may restore normal shoulder strength but doesn’t necessarily restore normal shoulder motion.  It could be, however, because the shoulder pain goes away, there is value in surgery.

In my estimation, there are two things you go into shoulder surgery for: relief from pain and restoration of your ability to DO STUFF.  If surgery can only provide relief from pain, what’s the point?

There are a great many other ways to relieve pain. Pills, for example, also relieve pain but don’t restore function.  A slap in the face could relieve the pain you feel in the shoulder (the old distraction method…) but would also do nothing to restore function to your shoulder.

What do you think?  Is there a good reason to have shoulder surgery for rotator cuff injuries given the sacrifice you must make in function?

Check out the abstract of this study on carpal tunnel surgery in the Journal of Hand Surgery (Volume 20, Issue 4, Long Term Results of Carpal Tunnel Release, Nancollas et al. ):

…the average time to maximum improvement of symptoms was 9.8 months. However, 30% reported poor to fair strength and long-term scar discomfort, and 57% noted a return of some pre-operative symptoms, most commonly pain, beginning an average of 2 years after surgery.

So let’s flesh that out.  It takes almost 10 months to feel your best after the surgery (time you’re resting, rehabbing, taking a break from work).  You have a 1 in 3 chance that you’ll not ever regain full strength.  And, here’s the kicker: the symptoms that cause you to get surgery have BETTER than a 1 in 2 chance of coming back in the few years following the surgery.

If you’re considering carpal tunnel surgery, those facts should give you pause.  If the symptoms come back (and boy do they!), perhaps there’s something wrong with the rationale for doing the surgery in the first place?

A few researchers have looked at why the ACL doesn’t often heal on its own, and the answer, according to one doctor, is as simple as this: the torn ends of the torn ligament aren’t able to get close enough to knit themselves back into one.

Looking at torn ACL tissue under the microscope, Dr. Murray discovered that the injury tries to heal on its own—cells proliferate, blood vessels grow—but the ligament ends never join. When most ligaments tear, a blood clot forms, creating a temporary scaffold for cells to migrate onto, but in ACL tears, fluid in the knee joint washes the clot away.

via Children’s Hospital Boston

This makes a lot of sense if you think about it.  If you got a paper cut, for example, the wound would eventually heal.  The skin grows back together over time.  As long as there is contact between the skin on either side of the cut, the skin will grow back together.

If you tear a ligament, as long as you can get the pieces to get close enough together, it’ll heal.  If you have a knee that’s twisted out of alignment, torquing the ACL into a compromised position, it’s only a matter of time before you blow it out completely.  Unless you fix that torqued position — even with a gel to help ACL heal — it seems like you’d just be waiting to blow it out all over again.

Questions are being raised about the science used to support the sitting postures recommended as being good for our backs and bodies.

Researchers at the University of Queensland’s Centre of Clinical Research Excellence in Spinal Pain, Injury and Health, have found that the posture often recommended as ideal cannot be achieved without assistance.

via ‘Ideal’ sitting posture questioned › News in Science (ABC Science).

Now, the research these guys are doing is laudable, because they’re attempting to discover what the actual consequences of bad posture really are.  But the slant, the quality of the research, and the applicability of their conclusions really have to be scrutizined.

They selected 10 men for their study and expect to be able to extrapolate these individuals’ muscular inability to perform a task to be proof that ideal sitting posture is a figment of our imaginations.

There are a couple of issues here.  One is that they used only 10 men.  That is not exactly a representative sample of the human species.

Two is that ideal sitting posture is only ideal when you’re actually able to achieve it, not when someone has to help you get into it by manually forcing you into the position.  If you can sit in ideal sitting posture, it says something about the way your muscles work in unison.  When they work well together, it feels good and requires little effort to maintain.

If you can’t get your body into that position, there’s no way your shoulders or hips are working in harmony with your spine.  Having someone force you into that position certainly doesn’t make everything copacetic and healthy.  For your body, it’s still a position of stress and strain.

If I took ten men from an office building and asked them to do fifty pushups, I’d be surprised if half of them could do it.  Does that mean it’s not achievable?  Of course not!  It just means those ten men haven’t trained their bodies to do it!  If I helped them do fifty pushups by putting a hydraulic lift under them to make it easier, do you think my measurements of their muscular output and their general fitness would be accurate?  No!

Why would it be different with sitting posture?

It wouldn’t.

Here’s the next part, and you have to look at it because it makes me laugh the hardest:

More importantly, the ideal curved lower back posture is not only difficult to achieve in a sitting position, it also takes effort to maintain.

via ‘Ideal’ sitting posture questioned › News in Science (ABC Science).

Think about this.  They took 10 men, forced them into a position they are not normally able to adopt, and then asked them to hold it!  Is there going to be effort to stay there?  Apparently you need a team of researchers to tell you yes.

The real reason why ideal sitting posture doesn’t exist for so many people (and these ten unfortunate men) is because they haven’t been training to be able to achieve it.

If you did pushups for 8 hours a day straight, nonstop for 20 years, you’d have some muscular imbalance issues that would probably prevent you from being able to raise your arms or reach behind you.  If you slouch for 8 hours a day, do you think that it’ll have an effect on your ability to get into ideal sitting posture?  It’s a no-brainer!

In this controlled trial involving patients with osteoarthritis of the knee, the outcomes after arthroscopic lavage or arthroscopic débridement were no better than those after a placebo procedure (emphasis added).

via A controlled trial of arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee. [New England Journal of  Medicine 2002]

So what’s that mean?  That means when you undergo arthroscopic knee surgery, you’re getting a $5000 placebo treatment that leads to several weeks of physical therapy, 6 to 8 weeks of gingerly handling your knee, an extended period of time taken off from work and play (assuming you ever get back to your play), and eventually the same chance of feeling better as if you had not bothered getting any surgery at all.

Sound like a good deal?

Get clear on this.  Arthroscopic knee surgery for osteoarthritis is no better than placebo.  You may as well have a friend swap the label on a jar of jelly beans for a label that says “Miracle Knee Pain Cure” and start eating those on a daily basis for three months.

While you’re eating those jelly beans, you may also want to consider restoring the proper balance of the muscles all around the knee joint and up into the hip and down into the ankle so that your knee starts functioning properly!