My Arthritis and Joint Pain is Annoying!

Whenever I think of joints and joint pain I come back to the analogy of laying on a bed of nails. I have vivid childhood memories of watching a magician lay on a bed of nails and being overwhelmingly impressed. Now that I’ve studied a variety of mechanical engineering concepts, I am admittedly less impressed. Seeing a 200 pound man lay on 200 nails is clearly an illusion. When you break it down logically, each nail is supporting only one pound of the magician’s body weight. Highly doable, right? What you won’t see is a 200 pound magician balancing on a few nails — for obvious reasons!!!

Now, imagine osteoarthritis being the 200 pound magician laying only on a few nails. An unrealistic amount of force is being distributed over a unreasonably low surface area — making the hyaline cartilage susceptible to wear, eventually leading to the pain and joint disease known arthritis. It is widely accepted that there is little you can do to treat actual osteoarthritis. However, if you can optimize the weight distribution/biomechanics of a joint, you can reduce how much wear there is on the areas affected by osteoarthritis thereby 1) reducing the pain and discomfort and, in some cases, allowing people get back to activity; 2) decreasing the amount of wear, ultimately slowing down the joint degeneration; 3) increasing movement quality and strength and 4) improving the possibility of staying mobile while aging well!

How do we do that?

Muscles! Skeletal muscle acts like a spiderweb with the joint in the centre. If the spiderweb is producing an uneven amount of tension or imbalanced strength, the joint will wear unevenly because the spiderweb will tighten itself in one direction or another to accommodate. Our Muscle Specialists can pinpoint joint systems that are weakened, thereby causing increased joint wear in the other areas working hard — or over-compromising — to pick up the slack.

Reestablishing high-quality and even strength disbursement can optimize your biomechanics and help you to enjoy mobility again so you can create your own kind of magic out there in the world. Comfortable motion doesn’t have to be an illusion.