If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.
What happened to Minnesoteans? Maybe the climate...
It is true that the hotter the climate, the more popular is the ingestion of heat. Mexico is an example, South East Asia and India even more so. My mother-in-law, who lived in Central Queensland (read: hot) made a fierce drink consisting of cloves, chilli and water. The Poms like a hot curry.
In Australia, lots of people drink hot tea when the temperature climbs over 101 degrees F; which it does almost everywhere. The sympathetic response seems to be quite enjoyable, regardless of the level of humidity. Someone told me that the 'built-up heat needs to be let out'...interesting thought.
As for humour, we are all different from country to country. I cannot understand many 'funny' USA films, and I believe, perhaps wrongly, they cannot as a whole, understand Aussie humour. But others are similar - we ran an advertisement to attract overseas folk, ending in a phrase which is normal speech for us..and Canada, the UK and the USA became quite upset.
I won't at this point relate the phrase - Bernard might censure me...
I had a student in Minneapolis today really struggling with the postural issue. She was evidently unhappy with my lack of respect for the deeply imbedded ideas about erectness that drive so much of the traditional thinking, which I can understand, but beyond that, spoke about the effect of one foot forward in standing. Apparantly this is suppose to help something but I never did figure out just what or what actual literature would support this.
The fifth question regarding hip position while supine can be asked to some extent while the patient is standing and I find this change often quite dramatic, relevant and easily defended in all of the neurodynamic literature but this is precisely where the conflict with this student began. When I questioned her knowledge of the subject she admitted she knew the names of the people who have investigated the neural tissues but hadn't read their work. She said, "I have two kids," which I guess explains that, but I didn't push her on the subject further.
In any case, I'm hoping she enters the conversation here as she indicated she would, perhaps even inviting one of her teachers, Robert Hruska, (I may have his first name wrong) from whom she learned about the importance of posture as she attended one of his Postural Restoration courses. I'd invite him myself but my attempts to engage him in a dialogue about these issues in the past have been ignored. Perhaps they just got lost in the mail.
Luke,
She wanted your name because she had an interest in your research project. I told her you'd be glad to share anything you could about this.
Obsessed as I am with theory and practice and, well, science, I found the web site for the Postural Restoration Institute and the correct name of its main guy, Ron Hruska.
Now that we have it, those viewing this thread can easily contact them about the issues of posture and clinical practice that occupy so much of our time. Perhaps after reading the "science" portion of the web site some questions regarding what is proposed and concluded there might pop into your head. Boy, I know I sure have some! (ha,ha)
It would probably be best if I didn't make this request for more information myself. I seem to have become some sort of "participant repellent," for lack of a better term. I contend it has something to do with my hair.
So, anybody interested in inviting Mr. Hruska over here?
A bit of a strange coincidence. I have this half-thought out idea that has been in my mind for a couple of days and I had intended on posting it here, then I read this thread and thought I would present it here.
I was running the other day, went down some wooden stairs and they broke on me. My leg slammed into the lower step, scraping it up and making me curse like a schoolgirl, have you heard these shoolgirls nowadays? Anyway, I continued running home and over the next few days I stayed on it and kept up my running. It ached slightly and the scrape hurt, but I basically ignored it. Then my foot swelled up like I had elephantitis with dark blothces. I didn't like that. I went to the doctor, he probed around my lower leg where I had hit, it ached but didn't hurt but you could feel a small step off in my tibia. It was broken. He then touched my ankle where it was swollen and that hurt, a lot. He was sure that I had hurt my ankle, I insisted my ankle was fine.
The object of this story is not to convince you that I am an idiot, but the fact that the "deep" hurt of the broken bone didn't bother me much but the "surface" hurt from the swelling really hurt. A similar thing happened when I had a AC separation, it didn't hurt much it just felt wrong, I would say it just proves that I'm a fine example of macho indifference to pain but it was taped up and when they ripped the tape off I practically cried. I don't think everyone responds the same way, I believe some are relatively indifferent to "surface" pain but sensitive to deeper pains. Another observation, which I believe is related, is the depth some people like to be massaged, some are very sensitive, some want it "deep". My wife prefers me to place all my weight on an elbow and dig it into her traps, she seems unable to relax them by herself.
I was wondering if others had any thoughts or observations about this. I was considering the possible psychological and physiological reasons this may be when I read Dianes post about ANS influences being different according the depth of the tissue and a little lightbulb went off.
I did warn you it was only half thought out, didn't I.
I also read something about eating Jalapenos to induce sweating/warming and subsequent cooling. There are some rather interesting properties of capsaicin in treating pain. I wonder if that has anything to do with their popularity in hot climates.
Apparently an old European remedy I heard from a German patient is to make a chilli paste and rub it onto the painful area,with vigor. She actually did this to her foot (which had an acutely painful plantar fascia) because it wasn't getting better with my treatment. She was painfree for three days.
Another one is the bee sting cure for low back pain.
Maybe there is more going on with counter-irritation than we think.
You've made a distinction between "deep" and "superficial" pain that, I guess, has something to do with the placement of the anatomy involved. Since the location of the part from which the painful signal rises has nothing to do with the severity of the pain experienced I really think you're on the wrong track and cannot therefore conclude anything about why you felt what you felt.
Go back to the origins of pain, think about the amount of mechanical deformation and/or chemical irritation possibly present in each of your painful experiences and I think it will all start making sense to you.
Your wife's problem relaxing probably isn't going to change as long as she continues to follow Iam's, uh, thinking and method. There are other ways to interpret it though. See Asking Why on my site.
I was running the other day, went down some wooden stairs and they broke on me. My leg slammed into the lower step, scraping it up and making me curse like a schoolgirl, have you heard these shoolgirls nowadays? Anyway, I continued running home and over the next few days I stayed on it and kept up my running. It ached slightly and the scrape hurt, but I basically ignored it. Then my foot swelled up like I had elephantitis with dark blothces.
This isn't exactly on the topic of pain, or Barrett's original theme, but fits in indirectly with the spicy foods theme, sort of ~
Don't run on a newly hurt leg! l'm not absolutely positive how scientific this is, other then my standard RICE training, but it works for me.
From '97-'99 I lived in southern Mexico , San Cristobal de las Casas in the mountains of Chiapas, where it was always cool at least by 5PM , and cold in Nov-Jan, but where we nevertheless could not eat anything without chillis or salsa, including peanuts and mangos.
While there I somehow sprained my ankle twice (both times because I was sitting, or squatting in an odd position and it went numb and then I tried to stand on it) It was pretty boring after a while hanging out in my tiny one-room dwelling, plus I had to at least go out for food (like chillis), since I lived with a crazy macho Mexican man who didn't know how to shop. We had to climb up and down a monumental set of stairs up a huge hill, at the top of which you could see the whole city. There was a little church at the top; we lived half way up. So, anyway, I didn't stop walking on my ankle either time, and both times it took months to heal. Ankle was fine for years after that. Until about 3 months ago when I was sitting in some bizarre position at the computer, ironically writing about my Mexican ex (which I hadn't done in years; no i don't think there was a connecton; interesting coincidence though) I jumped up and started to sprint to the bathroom on my numb leg, twisted my ankle severely, and thought OMG I'm going to be crippled for months again. This time I stayed off it as completey as possible for two days, iced it several times a day, did not start the cross-trainer at the gym again 'til it no longer hurt, and in less than a week it was healed.
Of course a break is going to take a bit longer to heal.
If anyone wants to see some Chiapas photos they are here
Here in Richmond, Va, USA the weather often changes dramatically from day to day (with the possible exception of dead of winter and dead of summer, which are not all that reliable either). I wonder what this says about our temperments. Are we thus more adaptable or just crazier?
Drinking hot beverages in hot weather tends to make me feel horrid, unless i'm in the ac, but i know other richmonders who like to drink hot things in hot weather (though they seem to be in a minority)
Randy's story makes experiential sense to me, and concept validity too..
First, the experiential part; once upon a time, I was jumping down over bleachers, my foot slipped into inversion and I felt a pop inside my shoe. It sort of hurt but not much, and the threat value seemed awfully low by contrast to the excitement of the party I planned on getting myself invited to (this was first year uni and I was all of 18 years old). I went to the party and even danced sockfoot. It was only when I tried to get my shoe back on and couldn't because of swelling that had built up in the meantime, did I think something might be actually wrong. I had to walk home in the snow in only a sock on that foot. Next day I hobbled to ER (it was a lot more painful by then) and it was a broken head of the fifth on xray.
Concept part; I think the takeaway point here is that mesoderm doesn't hurt. The sorts of physiological processes that occur in the surrounding nocioceptors as healing begins, do, and a lot (chemoreceptors). The brain does not want us to use the broken bone. (Duh.) The swelling etc. that builds adds a load of compression that hurts too (mechanoreceptors). The stoked "fire" in the zone, increased metabolism, cellular construction and deconstruction, add heat to the tissue, inflammation, and thermoreceptors become engaged too. These are all narrow diameter wide dynamic range polymodal receptors that act as nocioceptors when overstimulated/stimulated too many times too close together. (I think I got that right..) It's how the nervous system organizes affairs, keeps space optimized, by having a single kind of receptor that can convey all sorts of info when the "need" arises.
And I think it's true that skin (ectoderm) hurts way more than mesoderm. It makes sense that the outer wrapping of the body would have the fullest sensor array evolution could poossibly come up with, as it is our organismic intersection with the environment, both the outer and the inner environment. Was that your point Randy?
"Rene Descartes was very very smart, but as it turned out, he was wrong."~Lorimer Moseley
“Comment is free, but the facts are sacred.”~Charles Prestwich Scott, nephew of founder and editor (1872-1929) of The Guardian , in a 1921 Centenary editorial
“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you, but if you really make them think, they'll hate you." ~Don Marquis
"In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists"~Roland Barth
"Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one."~Voltaire
Here is something juicy, sent by Ian, on treatment of pain by capsaicin found in peppers, research being done on it, the link to temperature and to skin: Interview about article.
Apparently nocioceptors can be killed. Yikes.
The capsaicin receptor: a heat-activated ion channel in the pain pathway” (Caterina M.J., et al., Nature 389[6653]: 816-24, 23 October 1997) ... ranks among the 10 most-cited papers in the field of Neuroscience & Behavior over the past decade, with 1,330 citations to date. Dr. Caterina’s record in this field includes 13 papers cited a total of 2,930 times to date. Dr. Caterina is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Neuroscience.
Excerpt:
About 60 years ago, it was recognized that capsaicin had specific effects on certain nerves in our skin. This work was mostly done in Hungary. The Hungarian culture values paprika and other spicy foods quite a bit, and so it was sort of the birthplace of capsaicin research. Some instrumental work came out in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when Hungarian scientists showed that you could not only cause pain with capsaicin but could also desensitize pain-sensing neurons with chronic administration of capsaicin. It was recognized that the way this was working was that capsaicin was actually killing off the nerves in the rats that are responsible for initiating pain sensation. If it was administered to newborn rats, it could actually kill off a subpopulation of nerves that innervate the skin and allow the rats to sense pain. So the nerves that mediate non-painful touch remain perfectly intact, but the nerves that mediate pain sensation are gone for life. If you administer capsaicin to the adult rat, the nerve endings die back temporarily but they eventually grow back. This is one of the reasons why people who eat a lot of capsaicin-rich food become resistant to capsaicin after a while. Their nerve endings are actually desensitized.
So tell us about what you discovered and what you reported in the 1997 Nature paper.
The fundamental discovery was the identification of a protein that is expressed in a sub-population of nerves; that is, an ion channel protein that can be activated by capsaicin. That was one part of it. Another big part was that we showed that this protein is restricted to just the nerves involved in pain sensation. The real kicker was that this same protein could also be activated in the absence of capsaicin simply by increasing temperature into the painfully hot range. So it’s temperatures above about 42 degrees Celsius, roughly 108 degrees Fahrenheit, that will activate it, and that is the temperature where we start to feel pain on our skin.
How did you come to realize that it would also be activated by temperature?
What we reasoned was that no one had ever identified capsaicin inside the body, so it seemed unlikely that nature had put this channel in our pain-sensing neurons just so we could enjoy eating spicy foods. It seemed more likely that capsaicin, when it was causing pain, was essentially doubling for something that would normally provoke a sensation of pain. So what we did was screen through a number of stimuli we knew were capable of causing pain and also stimuli that had already been shown to activate sensory neurons when removed from the animal, and looked at in a dish. A year earlier, two different groups had shown that if you take the sensory nerves that normally innervate a rat’s skin and put them in a dish and record from them electrically, you could activate a sub-population of those nerves by increasing temperature. So our group did the same thing with this molecule we had recently isolated. We were able to express it in a cell line that normally didn’t make it. And not only did these cells become sensitive to capsaicin, but they became sensitive to heat.
"Rene Descartes was very very smart, but as it turned out, he was wrong."~Lorimer Moseley
“Comment is free, but the facts are sacred.”~Charles Prestwich Scott, nephew of founder and editor (1872-1929) of The Guardian , in a 1921 Centenary editorial
“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you, but if you really make them think, they'll hate you." ~Don Marquis
"In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists"~Roland Barth
"Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one."~Voltaire
About the mesoderm hurting/not hurting thing, I don't know if I am unusual or not, but the first time I sprained the ankle (tore a ligament i think, getting up from a park bench with a numb foot i'd been sitting on, and twisting it) the pain was very bad. In fact, I became very dizzy and nauseous and had to lie on the ground for a few minutes. Second time I don't remember one way or the other. Last time I had pain immediately too. I suppose the initial pain from the last time could have been from my cortex remembering i was supposed to feel pain, but not sure about that with the first time, which was my first ever ankle sprain (i think) I also had a pedestrian/auto accident in Mexico. I basically ran into a speeding car, on foot, or it ran into me, not sure which, and the car mirror sliced open a tendon on my right hand at the lower thumb joint I remember, again, being very dizzy and nauseous and nearly passing out (that Mexican dude in the pictures had to carry me across the highway) But I'm not sure I actually had too much pain at any point with that. I do remember the bandage ended up binding me so much that hurt and i had to go back and get that redone, after which it stopped hurting. The student doctor in San Cris did a decent job of stitching my tendon, by the way.
(right hand has "taken a beating" though it never gave my problems 'til post "old age" and weight-lifting)
About a year ago I burned myself badly on the arm, and it barely hurt at all...wierd? The corn I sometimes get on the bottom of my big two however, is sometimes very painful. I had the impression last year it caused mesoderm problems in the ball of my foot, because as soon as the corn was gone the other foot pain went away. That happen to anyone else?
If you twist your foot enough to tear a ligament or tendon isn't it likely you are directly straining and tearing at nerves too? Wouldn't that maybe tend to hurt immediately?
Recounting events that may or may not have hurt despite the severity of the tissue damage subsequently discovered simply reminds us that, as Patrick Wall says, "...tissue damage and pain are not so intimately linked that the two can be considered equivalent. We must therefore be very cautious and use one set of words for a stimulus event and another set for a perceived sensory event."
Can we say that sensory disturbances to the mesoderm are far less likely to hurt than those to the ectoderm? If we can back this up it's a powerful statement not only about what we look for but why we treat as we do.
Diane,
I know there's a thread specifically about how these two layers separate and into what. Can we link it here?
We process personal data about users of our site, through the use of cookies and other technologies, to deliver our services, personalize advertising, and to analyze site activity. We may share certain information about our users with our advertising and analytics partners. For additional details, refer to our Privacy Policy.
By clicking "I AGREE" below, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our personal data processing and cookie practices as described therein. You also acknowledge that this forum may be hosted outside your country and you consent to the collection, storage, and processing of your data in the country where this forum is hosted.
Comment