Read Online Healing Through Exercise: Scientifically Proven Ways to Prevent and Overcome Illness and Lengthen Your Life by Jörg Blech - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jörg Blech
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days per week. After three months, the first part of the program ended, but the volunteers were encouraged to keep their newly acquired walking habit.
The members of the second group were instructed to do nine different exercises at a weight-lifting machine. They, too, were asked to continue after the initial three-month period. Finally, there was a control group who received general information about osteoarthritis but were not prescribed any exercise.
One year later, all participants were examined to see whether they could still keep up with the activities of daily life. The result: In the control group, 53 percent of the people had lost the ability to live without assistance. In the other two groups, that was true only for 37 percent, no matter what type of activity they did. The more diligently a person trained, the better the result. Overall, the success rate could have been even larger had all the volunteers lived up to their resolutions. But after 10 months, only 54 percent of them continued the exercises. The dropouts altered the outcome of the study and, worse, their own health. 5
A review of the literature on osteoarthritic knees and exercise suggests that the type of exercise is less important than being active in the first place. Even moderate activities, like doing the Chinese martial art tai chi three days per week, bring promising results, Jean-Michel Brismée and colleagues at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, in Lubbock, Texas, have found. 6 In those cases, patients’ pain was relieved after only nine weeks, and the mobility of their joints improved. A recent study in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine showed that arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee “provides no additional benefit to optimized physical and medical therapy.” 7
The results are remarkable, given that mainstream medicine strongly favors more aggressive therapy options like drugs or surgical procedures. About 300,000 knee replacement operations and more than 193,000 hip replacement surgeries are performed each year in the United States. 8 Even though these interventions are often necessary and a pain-killing godsend for some patients, experts question whether so many are justified. “If we look at the age and objective discomforts of many patients who were advised to get an artificial hip, we cannot resist the impression that this operation was suggested very prematurely—long before the treatment with pills and other means like exercise and physiotherapy would have hit the wall,” says the physician Klaus-Michael Braumann at Hamburg University, Germany. 9
There are continuing concerns about the high rate of surgical joint replacement in Germany and in the United States because in both countries these interventions are costly for patients and insurers, and lucrative for doctors and hospitals.
RUNNING WITHOUT REMORSE
Another dangerous myth that keeps people sedentary is that running leads to the premature degradation of knee cartilage. Yet an increasing number of published medical articles indicate the opposite. According to these findings, all these women and men jogging through Central Park in Manhattan or along the Charles River in Boston are not ruining their knees. Actually, it is the large number of sedentary and often obese Americans who sit and lie around whose cartilage is more likely to be in decay.
However, it is very important which type of exercise one chooses. Soccer and downhill skiing are certainly not very good for knees. This is not because of the exercise as such, but because of the high risk of injury to key parts of the knee, such as the capsules under the kneecap, the kneecap itself, and the key ligament in the knee known as the cruciate ligament. Playing competitive sports does indeed increase the likelihood of suffering from osteoarthritis rather early in life. In one survey, doctors examined the knees of 117 men who formerly were elite athletes and found a
The members of the second group were instructed to do nine different exercises at a weight-lifting machine. They, too, were asked to continue after the initial three-month period. Finally, there was a control group who received general information about osteoarthritis but were not prescribed any exercise.
One year later, all participants were examined to see whether they could still keep up with the activities of daily life. The result: In the control group, 53 percent of the people had lost the ability to live without assistance. In the other two groups, that was true only for 37 percent, no matter what type of activity they did. The more diligently a person trained, the better the result. Overall, the success rate could have been even larger had all the volunteers lived up to their resolutions. But after 10 months, only 54 percent of them continued the exercises. The dropouts altered the outcome of the study and, worse, their own health. 5
A review of the literature on osteoarthritic knees and exercise suggests that the type of exercise is less important than being active in the first place. Even moderate activities, like doing the Chinese martial art tai chi three days per week, bring promising results, Jean-Michel Brismée and colleagues at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, in Lubbock, Texas, have found. 6 In those cases, patients’ pain was relieved after only nine weeks, and the mobility of their joints improved. A recent study in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine showed that arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee “provides no additional benefit to optimized physical and medical therapy.” 7
The results are remarkable, given that mainstream medicine strongly favors more aggressive therapy options like drugs or surgical procedures. About 300,000 knee replacement operations and more than 193,000 hip replacement surgeries are performed each year in the United States. 8 Even though these interventions are often necessary and a pain-killing godsend for some patients, experts question whether so many are justified. “If we look at the age and objective discomforts of many patients who were advised to get an artificial hip, we cannot resist the impression that this operation was suggested very prematurely—long before the treatment with pills and other means like exercise and physiotherapy would have hit the wall,” says the physician Klaus-Michael Braumann at Hamburg University, Germany. 9
There are continuing concerns about the high rate of surgical joint replacement in Germany and in the United States because in both countries these interventions are costly for patients and insurers, and lucrative for doctors and hospitals.
RUNNING WITHOUT REMORSE
Another dangerous myth that keeps people sedentary is that running leads to the premature degradation of knee cartilage. Yet an increasing number of published medical articles indicate the opposite. According to these findings, all these women and men jogging through Central Park in Manhattan or along the Charles River in Boston are not ruining their knees. Actually, it is the large number of sedentary and often obese Americans who sit and lie around whose cartilage is more likely to be in decay.
However, it is very important which type of exercise one chooses. Soccer and downhill skiing are certainly not very good for knees. This is not because of the exercise as such, but because of the high risk of injury to key parts of the knee, such as the capsules under the kneecap, the kneecap itself, and the key ligament in the knee known as the cruciate ligament. Playing competitive sports does indeed increase the likelihood of suffering from osteoarthritis rather early in life. In one survey, doctors examined the knees of 117 men who formerly were elite athletes and found a
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