 The author on a recent hike (By Grace Rollins, MS, LAc) As I write this it's the last day of April, but I only just learned this month is considered National Foot Health Awareness Month. Well, there are a few hours left in the month so it's not too late to draw attention to the importance of foot health.
Why do foot issues impact us so much? First off, they impact our mobility. If your foot hurts, it can be really hard to exercise or do the daily walking we know is vital for our health. Since so much about our health depends upon physical activity, a foot injury or repetitive strain can create snowball effects. Secondly, the health of our feet impacts our entire musculoskeletal system. The key word here is system. Our bones, joints and muscles work together in a coordinated fashion, and no one part is separate from the movement and functioning of the whole. In particular, the way we use the many joints and muscles of our feet (or the way we don't use them) has ramifications all the way up your anatomy chains. Your feet alone have 33 joints, 26 bones, and more than a hundred muscles, tendons and ligaments. Why would nature design us with so many tiny joints and muscles in the foot? If you guessed to serve as an active, intelligent interface between the body and the terrain, you win! (The prize is a barefoot walk across the yard.) When such a complex structure loses mobility, strength, sensory input, tissue integrity, or becomes inhibited by pain and deformity, it changes the way we interact with the terrain and impacts the body from toe to head. A third reason foot health impacts us so much is that feet are sensitive, yo!
0 Comments
 (By Paolo Propato, LAc) My son likes to call the body the “meat suit” that just takes cues from the brain, helping it get from point A to point B. Instead, I like to think of the body as the most highly sophisticated antenna in existence, transmitting and receiving all types of information that connects us to the world. Our unconscious mind listens to this all the time, but sometimes we need to fine-tune the conscious mind to listen better.
For instance, take the very ground you walk on. Whether you are walking on soft moss, asphalt, tiles, pebbles… these all have a different effect on your joint angles and motor function, your vestibular sense, even your emotions. The body even senses electron exchange with the earth, if we permit it to have direct contact through our skin to conductive surfaces like soil and water. The sound and vibration of our foot falls, the temperature of the ground, the pain or pleasure of certain pressures and stretches on the foot, different types of footwear… it’s a never-ending exchange of information with your entire body, if you tune in and listen, and your body can learn and adapt from this information. I was told by one of my acupuncture teachers that in Japan, stroke patients are sometimes told to walk barefoot on a rocky beach as part of their rehabilitation. To take another example: our emotional environment. Our very thoughts affect the functioning of the body, and just think of all the things that influence our thoughts on a daily basis!  (By Brian Yang and Grace Rollins, LAc) Since I’ve been working lately with several cases of shoulder pain I thought I would offer some insights into how we approach common shoulder problems as acupuncturists. The shoulder allows for many of the movements that we use an everyday basis, and has an incredibly broad range of motion compared to other major joints-– something that allows a healthy shoulder to hang, reach, climb and throw with ease. Some of the incredible mobility of the shoulder comes from the shallowness of the ball-and-socket portion (the glenohumeral joint), and the fact that it has three other joints in addition to that ball-and-socket: the sternoclavicular joint (where your collar bone meets the breast bone), the scapulothoracic joint (where your shoulder blade glides close to the ribcage), and the acromioclavicular joint (where your shoulderblade meets your collarbone). In other words, the shoulder joint is actually four joints!
Similarly, the “rotator cuff” (or “rotator cup” as some are fond of saying) is not just one muscle but four (supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres minor, and subscapularis)-- forming a “cuff” that helps “rotate” your upper arm in all different dimensions. In addition to your rotator cuff muscles, we could mention several muscles involved in scapular movement, upper and lower arm movements, and the relational movements between the neck and shoulder, not to mention muscles that impact the brachial plexus (innervation to the shoulder). Shout-out to the lats, biceps, triceps, pecs, scalenes, levator scapula, serratus, and don’t forget everyone’s favorites, the upper trapezius and rhomboids! With such a complex “joint” there are many types of pathologies that can cause pain and loss of range of motion in the shoulder: tendonitis, tendinopathy and degeneration, arthritis, adhesive capuslitis (“frozen shoulder”), bursitis, impingement, fracture, radiculopathy, neurovascular compression, dislocation and more. Due to the complexity of the shoulder it’s helpful to narrow in on the origin of pain. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2023
Categories |
RSS Feed