Soar into Health

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.” – Theodore Roosevelt As a traditionally trained physical therapist, I am always seeking to provide simple explanations for patients so they can easily perform their home exercise program in order to recover from injury, illness or surgery. It sounds easy, but as any health care provider knows, translating what is said or done in the office is often entirely different out of the office. You must translate technical verbiage to layman’s terms that the patient will understand. For example, “external rotation of the glenohumeral joint” is meaningless for most. Translated to “outward rotation of the shoulder” improves the odds of performing the exercise properly, not perfectly, but better. A photo or picture also helps. Proper communication is essential and often difficult. In the rehabilitation world, we also need to communicate between healthcare providers so everyone understands what is going on. Writing every single word and account of everything can be very time consuming. One-way to make it more efficient is to use acronyms. Acronym, a noun, is defined in the Webster dictionary as a word formed from the first (or first few) letters of a series of words, as radar, from radio detecting and ranging. 1 Home exercise program becomes HEP. Independent with activities of daily living becomes IADL. Acronyms commonly are used for procedures in orthopedics. For example, THR – total hip replacement or TKR – total knee replacement. These acronyms are very useful in communicating between healthcare providers and abbreviating in order to save some time. With the advent of computer documentation, these acronyms aren’t nearly as common and as it turns out, they weren’t as clear for communication as they may have been intended. I am married to an orthopedic surgeon and my father was an ear nose and throat surgeon who had a stint in the military, so I have heard a few other interesting acronyms. A couple of my favorites are military in background but are often used in the trauma bay. They contain profanity, so I apologize ahead of time given my initial goal is to make this book family friendly. However, sometimes profanity really gets the message across well, if you know what I mean. SNAFU – situation normal: all fucked up FUBAR – fucked up beyond all recognition These may be my favorite. In the past few years during my journey to health, I see these two acronyms daily. We, most humans, have made our lives so complicated that it doesn’t even look like a life anymore. And it has become NORMAL. That is the crazy part; that we have become so “fucked up” that we actually believe it is normal. What I have begun to realize is that our health and wellness should NOT look like immobility and illness, despite how common (or normal) it is today. Even as a healthcare provider, we think it is normal because it is all that we see. Even with our best intentions, we are totally missing the mark. Healthcare has become solely a management system, rather than a prevention and recovery system. And until a few years ago, I thought that was normal too. So, as I raise my children and try to care for patients, how do I actually share the message in an understandable form that my children and patients and other healthcare providers will remember what to do and how to apply to their own lives? And that is where another acronym comes to play. It happens to also have a background in the US Navy in 1960 by an engineer at Lockheed Skunk Works: KISS – keep it straight forward stupid or keep it simple stupid I don’t mean to imply that anyone specifically is actually stupid. Yet maybe we all are, including myself. Seriously. Aren’t we all just a bit “stupid” to accept being “fucked up” as normal? I know some very smart and intelligent people who accept being “fucked up” as just a normal part of aging and life. I included myself in that group until recently. (Profanity will end from this point on) Yet, KISS principles, simple principles, can help guide us to health and potentially prevent disease. They may not always be the easiest to do, but they are simple and straightforward when you step back from the craziness and look. It’s funny, because my husband, the orthopedic surgeon, said to me once, “Healthy marriage requires that we kiss for a whole 10 seconds to make a connection.” Turns out he made it up. That’s ok. I like what it stands for. KISS principles are simple, but not easy. Like a healthy kiss requires 10 seconds to connect, maybe it takes that long to also make a decision based on KISS principles. Who knows?!? One of my favorite quotes is from Theodore Roosevelt, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort…” All too often we fall into habits of convenience and ease, yet making our lives more complicated and filled with illness. If we had to take a little more time, a little more effort but could prevent illness and immobility, and live our lives full of learning, exploring, connecting and moving, wouldn’t that be worth it? For me, I say, “Absolutely because the results of an ‘easy and convenient’ life scare me to death.” Let me explain. I have seen one too many patient’s with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic low dack pain, chronic sprains that fail to recover, and cancer just to name a few. Once you have these diseases, it is hard if not impossible to properly “manage” them and live a life filled with exploring, connecting, movement, or learning. No one deserves these diseases, and by no means are they to blame. All these years I have tried hard as a physical therapist to help every single patient to the best of my abilities. I can’t say that I didn’t help most of them, but never did I give them the life they used to have back. I thought it was my failure. I wasn’t a good therapist. I didn’t pick the right exercise or do the correct manual treatment. I kept looking for changes on our outcome measures that I saw only change a few points. Only sometimes were there dramatic changes. These patients often suffered terribly, especially those with degenerative autoimmune disease like Parkinson’s disease, or Multiple Sclerosis. I felt helpless. In the end, it is very egotistical of me to think that I could have done any of that for anyone. What if, had those patient’s known 20 or 30 years ago, that eating well, moving well, sleeping well meant that they would be thriving now? What if? Then one day it changed for my family, my patients and myself. I discovered the importance of nutrition, the importance of movement, the importance of sleep and what it means to thrive. I didn’t discover it all on my own, but with lots of reading, research, personal experimentation and support from my family I discovered something that improved my life. And I have tried to put together KISS principles that will help many. So, I write this book in hopes to share some of what I have learned. I can’t take credit for the information as many others smarter than all of us already figured it out and continue to share, research and move health and wellness into today’s world. I am merely trying to put it into KISS principles that my children, my husband, my patients, other health professionals, other mothers and really anyone can use so they can work on putting KISS principles into their life to prevent disease, maintain their health or improve their situation. More important, I want everyone to be able to make a healthy choice on your own, not dependent on a moneymaking pyramid scheme, not dependent on a healthcare system that simply CAN NOT do it for you. We are here on this Earth to thrive, not suffer.