Everything has a price.
When it comes to foot, knee and hip pains there are many approaches to helping improve a person’s comfort. One of the most popular approaches is changing shoes or perhaps adding shoe insoles. People get lots of different shoe recommendations and boy can they make a difference in a person’s comfort in the short term. But at what price?
Working from the understanding that Alf Breig, Neurosurgeon, came to in his four decades of spinal research, we function better (we’re healthier in large part) when our spinal cord is in its most relaxed state. For that to happen, one’s posture needs to be as good as possible because the shape of one’s spine determines the pull (or lack thereof) on the spinal cord. [More pull equals bad.]
“So,” you might ask, “how does one know what price they are paying for those new shoes or insoles that are helping them feel better?”
Well, if the shoes are good for your posture the price is merely the cost of the shoes! If not, the price is all the future damage to your body that you don’t realize is going on plus all of the costs of treatment and the costs of getting to and from that treatment, etc.
If you want to find out if your new shoes come with unknown costs my suggestion is to do the following experiment. It will get you started on a process that is useful in many circumstances to see if something is harming you more than you know for the years to come. The experiment is to take some pictures and do some comparison over time. Here’s how:
1. With your shoes off (and while standing on a flat, firm surface) have somebody take a side-view photo of you from head to toe immediately after you breath in, breath out and let your body slump (don’t hold your body up, don’t make it fall down, simply relax completely in gravity and see how your body ends up).
2. With your shoes on take another photo after you breath in, breath out and let your body slump (don’t hold it up, don’t make it fall down, simply relax completely in gravity and see how your body ends up).
3. Closely compare the photos. Look to see if, with your shoes on compared to with your shoes off,
a. your head and shoulders go forward,
b. your body looks more slouched or more stressed.
c. your belly looks more pronounced,
d. your hands are more forward compared to your thighs,
e. you feel more wobbly in your shoes.
There are many more things to look for and it is much easier to see these things after your posture has been improved with our posture protocol.
4. Repeat this process over time, say, once a month. You will be able to see what is physically happening to your body as your posture moves around in three dimensions. Shoes that are bad for your body (no matter how comfortable they may feel) are moving your physical stress around (and definitely increasing it) while possibly making your complaint feel better. Bad shoes (defined as shoes that make you slump more) cause deeper posture problems and lead to symptoms such as painful joints anywhere in your body and difficult breathing from compression of your lungs and heart. Your other organs will be effected eventually as well. Tendons and ligaments will also get pulled on and increasingly irritated (even if this isn’t symptom producing for some years).
The meaningful solution to symptoms is to restore one’s body to the condition it was prior to the unwanted symptoms. That is what we do with our Posture Protocol,
Peace & Health,
Dr. Dirk
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