SaveYourself.ca

The wrong notch

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:02:12 -0700

A nice example of anatomical variation: the size and shape of a notch in the top of the shoulder blade is quite variable, and nerve impingement is much more likely if you’ve got the wrong type of notch. More anatomical variation examples:

You Might Just Be Weird

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A taijiquan spelling bee

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:02:11 -0700

Reader C.W. wrote with a good correction: it’s “taijiquan,” not “taiqi,” as I have often carelessly written on this website, despite practicing taijiquan for most of my life. This has been in my mental “need to get clear about that” file for the entire time. I’m a language enthusiast (as a writer should be), and I knew that I didn’t have this down, but just had never gotten around to looking it up. I’ve now fixed this in a few places on SaveYourself.ca.

For a gold star, always use either taiji or, even better, taijiquan — that’s the modern Pinyin transliteration. But the older Wade-Giles version, t’ai chi or t’ai chi ch’uan, is still common, and the simplified tai chi is acceptable and common. Just don’t mix up your chi with your ch’i. Ji and chi are not the same thing as ch’i and qi — almost everyone makes this mistake (including me, for many years). Ji/chi is a philosophical concept, a really deep thought, hard to define and translate, but “pole” or “ultimate” will do. Qi/ch’i refers to breath or life energy, like the western concept of vis vitalis (vital force) or the Greek pneuma (breath, spirit, soul). So t’ai chi really is not tai ch’i — moving the apostrophe changes the meaning.

This information added to the article Tai Chi Helps Fibromyalgia, but It’s Not “Alternative” Medicine (and it’s no accident that title uses “tai chi” — for search engines, you’ve got to stick to the most popular spellings).

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The anti-placebo

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:02:10 -0700

Placebo is belief-powered relief from symptoms, while nocebo is belief-powered symptoms, or “the placebo effect’s malevolent Mr. Hyde.” And: “The Internet has become a powerful…nocebo dosing machine.” Agreed: nocebo is a genuine hazard when writing about medical problems. Read more:

www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elemen —SNIP— sick.html

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Progressive mythology

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:02:09 -0700

Progressive mythology: Dr. Harriet Hall’s review (plus some excellent reader comments) of Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left, Berezow & Campbell. A great book idea. This quote isn’t particularly representative of the book’s message, but it’s a very important idea (which I have written about):

Just because a published paper presents a statistically significant result does not mean it necessarily has a biologically meaningful effect.
— Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left, Alex Berezow & Hank Campbell

www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/progressive-mythology

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Blood injection treatment bombs a test

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:02:08 -0700

Utterly unsurprising: injecting your own blood doesn’t help tendinitis. Nice to have a decent new trial about this over-hyped therapy though.

The administration of two unguided peritendinous autologous blood injections one month apart, in addition to a standardised eccentric training programme, provides no additional benefit in the treatment of mid-portion Achilles tendinopathy.

Not many good treatment ideas work as well in practice as they do in theory. The null hypothesis is super reliable.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3629924

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No more store trouble, but sheesh

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:02:07 -0700

Thursday and Friday’s trouble with my e-bookstore now seems to be cleared up, but it took a solid 48 hours. Fascinatingly, the slowness of the recovery may have been due to a major hacking incident several weeks ago, which affected basic internet infrastructure: that is, the “Domain Name System” (DNS) may be damaged and/or deliberately slowed down as a security measure. The theory is that corrected information about the location of my e-bookstore took much longer (2 days) to spread around the world than it would have before (2 hours). Here’s an interesting NY Times article about the hacking incident, with good diagrams:

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03 —SNIP— olded.html

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Service announcement for customers

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:02:06 -0700

For most of Thursday and into Friday morning, my online store has been flickering on & off like an old neon sign. Geeks are slaving to restore full service, and seem to have mostly succeded at this point. •mops cold sweat from brow• Part of the problem is that the internet “lost” the correct address for the store. That’s mostly fixed now, but there are still some computers out there that don’t know the correct address. Depending on where you live, you might see a weird generic page instead of my actual store. But the correct information is steadily spreading around the world (“Domain Name System (DNS) info propagation”), and I am fairly confident the worst is over. Naturally I’m readily available for any customer having trouble.

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Promising new fitness blog

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:02:05 -0700

A promising new fitness blog. The State of Evidence-Based Fitness:

www.evidencebasedfitness.net/the-state-of-evidence-based-fitness

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Replication needed

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:02:04 -0700

“Replication needed” is the ultimate caveat in scientific criticism. It covers all the bases. Everything else is just details. At the end of the day, if promising results cannot be replicated by other researchers, it doesn’t really matter what was wrong with the original research. Either a treatment works well enough to consistently produce impressive results … or it doesn’t. Updated article:

The “Impress Me” Test

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Surprise run

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:02:03 -0700

Ever run much farther than you thought you could? I haven’t done more than 5km in ages, and I often only do 2km at a time (I’ve never been much for distance as a runner, I like sprinting) … and then suddenly a pair of big 13km runs around Stanley Park in a week! The first run was a total shock, and probably an unwise spike in pavement pounding — honestly, I’m amazed I didn’t hurt myself, prone as I am to RSIs. But I got away with it just fine.

And the 2nd run? I had to see if the 1st was a fluke! I guess it wasn’t — I did just fine again. I’ll be danged.

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Knowledge = happiness

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:02:02 -0700

Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
— George Washington, 1790

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Good pain reading for pros

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:02:01 -0700

Superb paper about pain for professionals, with a very broad scope: it’s just called “Pain.” I love a simple title.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcs.1201/full

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The effects of sleep deprivation

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:02:00 -0700

Sleep: What the Research Actually Says: A readable review of the effects of sleep deprivation, with good nugget-sized highlights throughout, from my friends at Examine.com, Sol Orwell and Kurtis Frank. One quibble! Nothing about pain. But of course I have something about insomnia and pain (Insomnia Until it Hurts).

www.ericcressey.com/sleep-what-the-research-actually-says

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The power of barking

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:01:59 -0700

This is basically how humans decide what to believe in (e.g. simple correlations, emotional priorities). “I have the power of barking to thank for that.”

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Antibiotics for back pain reality check

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:01:58 -0700

This is great! A nicely written reality check on the antibiotics for back pain hype, from PubMed. Great stuff.

Back pain is one of the richest myth mines in all of medicine. An extremely common, often serious, and usually mysterious pain problem = absolutely maximum fertility for bullshit to grow in. There are a great many books about low back pain, and many are garbage, selling snake oil and hype and false hope instead of good information. There are also some fine myth-busting books about low back pain … and mine is one of them.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/behind —SNIP— back-pain

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I was wrong: muscle is cheap, not expensive

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:01:57 -0700

After a burst of recent interest in my article about strength training frequency, and some good discussions with experts, I made some significant changes and a particularly important correction/retraction regarding the metabolic cost of muscle, the 50-calorie-per-pound-per-day myth. My error was pointed out by James Krieger of Weightology, who has written about it. Here’s a more thorough article about it. The gist of the article was fine, but my original text was definitely wrong and misleading on this interesting tangentially related point. I revised that whole section to minimize the importance of muscle-gain for weight loss, and I now acknowledge the original error: “There’s a common myth that every pound of muscle burn about 50–100 calories, which I carelessly repeated myself in early versions of this article. That number is much too high, and no one seems to be sure where it came from — just one of those things that gets passed around.” I elaborate in a footnote:

I originally got the 50/day figure from McGuff & Little in Body By Science: “Muscle mass is the most metabolically expensive tissue in the body. You require between 50 and 100 calories a day just to keep a pound of it alive.” This is wrong by a long shot. The brain is vastly more metabolically expensive, for instance. This seems like a clear cut case of confirmation bias: McGuff & Little presented this unsubstantiated myth as fact in their book because it would be wonderful support for their big idea … if only it were true. And then I did the same thing! Arg.”

Less is Not Less

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And then I read my email…

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:01:56 -0700

Sometimes I think: manual therapy is getting progressive, more science-based, clinical reasoning is growing up. Yay!

Then I read my email.

If the contents of my inbox are any measure (and they probably are), then, alas, there is still a great deal of work to do. Crazy numbers of professionals in manual therapy have clearly not even begun to understand the need to properly test treatments. And many even fight it!

www.testingtreatments.org/tt-main-text/background/foreword

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Do I like “SaveYourself.ca”?

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:01:55 -0700

People ask about this occasionally: no, I don’t actually like my domain name, “SaveYourself.ca.” It smacks of religion & too-good-to-be-true promises and I’m not comfortable with that. It’s a legacy from many years ago when I had no idea what this site would become. I plan to move to a new domain name within a year.

P.S. I may not actually like my domain name, but I do still love my salamander mascot.

[View microblog post #115 on SaveYourself.ca]

Two tiny quotes

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:01:54 -0700

Just finished reading a slightly trashy novel, Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, and mined it for a couple of nice little quotes: “Sleep is like a cat: it only comes to you if your ignore it.” Perfect quote nugget for Save Yourself from Insomnia! And: “To pretend to be calm is to be calm, in a way,” which made me think of posture/mood interdependence, discussed in Does Posture Matter? (Mostly for emotional reasons!)

[View microblog post #114 on SaveYourself.ca]

Bad icing news?

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:01:53 -0700

Bad icing news? A small study of icing for severe muscle soreness after intense exercise (a.k.a DOMS) had “unexpected” results, according to the researchers. It seemed to do more harm than good. The icing victims had higher blood levels of molecules associated with muscle injury, and they felt more fatigued. Icing also had no effect on recovery of strength, or any biochemical sign of inflammation, as one would hope. A small study, to be sure, but how good can icing be if it can generate this kind of data? See also Yamane et al.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22820210

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Strengthening for the not-so-young

Sat, 04 May 2013 00:01:52 -0700

A charming, well-produced video summary of why and how to build strength, pitched to the not-so-young-anymore, done by the University of BC (which is in my backyard).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG6sJm2d4oc

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Incurable shitty ankle

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:01:51 -0700

Comedian Louis CK on aging joints:

The doctor shows me an x-ray of my ankle and he’s like, “Yeah, your ankle’s just, uh… worn out.”
“What do you mean? I injured my ankle?”
He’s like, “No, it’s just shitty now.”

Watch that excerpt (1:00) from his “Incurable Shitty Ankle” bit from his 2008 stand-up show Chewed Up. You can also watch the full segment (2:30) on YouTube.

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Jedi pain tricks!

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:01:50 -0700

Even though brains are in total control of pain, your brain also does a lot of that without you. For instance, brains modulate pain based on a number of other things that are completely out of your control, or rather difficult to control, or even just impractical to control. For instance, if you view a painful hand through a magnifying glass, it will actually get more swollen and inflamed — that is, if you make it look bigger, it will get bigger. And the reverse is true! (See Moseley et al.) Use optics to make it look smaller, and swelling will go down. Incredible, right? Jedi pain tricks!

But here’s the (large) catch: do you have a de-magnifying glass handy? Where do you buy even one of those, let alone a big one? What happens if the pain isn’t in a place that’s so easy to de-magnify, like your low back? Although dang interesting, the de-magnification trick is not generally a practical approach. The effect is real under the right circumstances, but trying to use it as a treatment is like trying to take a magician’s trick home with you. For more about pain and “mind over matter,” see Pain is an Opinion.

[View microblog post #110 on SaveYourself.ca]

Goodbye supplement confusion

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:01:49 -0700

Interesting, impressive new work announced today by Examine.com: a well-crafted new presentation of a huge database of scientific evidence that “clearly tells you what a supplement does (and doesn’t do). Goodbye supplement confusion.” This rabbit hole goes deep, so browse. Look at their “Human Effect Matrix” tables for key topics in particular, which beautifully summarize the science (go right to an example, for creatine). What’s remarkable here is the quality of the presentation. These are not just tables of data! They are quite artful, crafted to emphasize what matters. I would love to have evidence presented like this on SaveYourself.ca, and I do have some of the foundations for it — but I’m a few design and technology leaps away from being able to deliver something like that.

www.examine.com/blog/weve-solved-supplement-confusion

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Two links, one serious, the other … not

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:01:48 -0700

This article updated recently: What can a runner with knee pain do at the gym? That’s handy, but this link is more fun: 20 Reasons Why Going To The Gym Is A Huge Waste Of Time (actually just 20 short videos of hilarious exercise misfortune).

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