February 20th, 2010 by admin

The injuries we pick up when playing sports fall into two main classes. In contact sports, there are serious risks of broken bones, torn tendons or ligaments, or strains. The other less physical sports leave it to the players to damage themselves by repeating the same muscle movements excessively. So tennis, badminton and squash players find repetitive strain injury to their elbows. Runners damage their knees. Focussing on the muscle injuries, strains and tears always have the same pattern. You damage the tissue in the muscles or ligaments, and this produces inflammation. Pain, swelling and loss of function follow. For a professional athlete, being unable to turn out for the team or to play the next big tournament can have serious financial implications. Doctors who specialize in sports injuries are therefore employed by all the top teams in football, baseball and soccer. The plan is always to get the stars back on the field again as quickly as possible. Except this can be controversial because, sometimes, treatment is accelerated for a particular match rather than for the benefit of the player’s long-term career. Many top players have had their careers cut short by knee injuries when their teams owner’s were too ambitious for success. Read the rest of this entry »

February 20th, 2010 by admin

There is always a point where science collides with belief systems and sparks fly. Looking around the US right now, the continuing confrontation over the teaching of evolution is a classic example. At a slightly lower level of intensity is the continuing conflict between the “hard science” doctors and those who are persuaded that there are alternative approaches to treatment with equally good outcomes. Take acupuncture as an example. This comes out of nearly two thousand years of medical experience in China. Even though some of the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) methods have been displaced in favor of Western methods, the healthcare service in many Asian and ASEAN countries continues to rely on acupuncture as an effective treatment for a range of different problems. Putting TCM to one side, there are also major claims made for different forms of meditation. Some are explicitly rooted in religions. Others are directly adapted to the management of pain. Unfortunately, the Enlightenment and the adoption of the scientific method by Western doctors leads them to a quick dismissal of everything not backed up by their science. Even when shown perfectly respectable research proving some of the claims for “unscientific” methods, they still refuse to even consider them. Their prejudices are deep-seated.

In the case of meditation, there is a growing body of Western-based research using the scientific method which shows excellent outcomes when people suffering from chronic pain are taught how to meditate. In essence, the point is to change the attitude of people towards their pain. Put another way: the level of intensity of the pain stays the same but the people change their emotional reaction to it. At some level, this represents a form of intellectual distraction. People are trained how to disconnect themselves from the pain and to search for ways to live their lives without worrying about it. Too often, people allow the pain to dominate their every waking moments. They fear the pain will always be there and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that blights their lives. Avoiding this fear and focussing instead on positive ways to cope with the reality of the pain allows people to rebuild their daily lives and to function more effectively. Read the rest of this entry »