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Three years ago I was left crippled by a chiropractor and told that I would never walk again and I would end up paralyzed. I have put a previous posting on what happened to me. By a miracle, I met a bloke called Al Meilus [ www.meilus.com ]. Al was a senior robotics engineer with General Electric and was responsible for automating all of GE’s factories in America. One morning he woke up and couldn’t keep his balance. The doctors told him that he had an inner problem and that he would have to remain in bed for the rest of his life. Al refused to accept that and hired a doctor, dentist and physical therapist to help him find the problem. Eventually they found that a muscle in his neck on the left side was tighter than a muscle on the right side [ a muscular imbalance – very important for some of the other problems I’ll talk about later ]. The muscle was called the sternocleidomastoid and runs from your breast bone to just behind the ear.

http://www.realbodywork.com/learn/neck/Scm.JPG

The inner ear [ which controls balance ] has a number of little bones filled with fluid. The extra pressure caused by that muscle led to Al’s imbalance. Over several months, they gradually loosened the muscle. Al got his balance back. He was so amazed at how one little muscle could change someone’s life that he gave up his job at GE and became a muscular therapist. After ten years of poking and prodding, he developed a hernia and could no longer work. He then designed a robot to replace his hands. NASA and Lockheed Martin via the University of South Florida had a program to give grants to inventors. First though Al had to prove to them that the robot could do what no human could. I’ll cover more about it in another post.

Fox TV in Tampa heard about my diagnosing myself and did a documentary on my case. They produced a clip which I’ve attached. Some of it is a bit dis-jointed as they just took bits and pieces from the program. It’s also very “americanized’, but you can see the robot well. Al treats a lot of SF guys who have come back from the wars and for whom conventional military medicine has not worked.

In the mid 70’s I was with the mortars and we did a night jump at Barry Buddon. On that DZ you exit almost over the beach and the winds blow you landwards. Strong winds hit us and we got blown all over the place.A young lad straight out of Brize came through my rigging lines. I nearly s*** myself as I was very close to the ground. By the time I pulled the rigging lines apart, I hit the ground. I just managed to lower my container. The ground was very peaty and soft. I went in a good foot into the ground and twisted my ankle. I thought I’d only sprained it. I pulled my puttee off and made a quick bandage thing. Grabbed my PX1 Mk4, reserve, Bergen and 81mm tube and started walking. Because the ground was very soft, I managed to hobble back to the RV. One of the PJI’s asked what happened. I told him about my ankle. He took a quick look and said “It’s sprained that’s all”. I took his word for it [ big mistake ]. Back to Glasgow. Went to see a doctor. He told me it was just sprained. No x-ray .It was actually fractured. Al told me later on that one incident set off a chain of events in my body which caused me big problems with my hips and pelvis later on. I’ll cover more on what happens when you break or fracture something later on. If the DZ had been hard, there would probably have been no way I’d even been able to get far.

Moral: If you are hurting and you are sure something is wrong, get a second opinion, even if it costs you privately. There are so many ex-paras with bad backs whose problems have actually started with their feet.

Here’s the clip: [ There may be a short advertisement before it opens ] . Please let me know if the link does not open.

http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/myfox/page ... 1.1&sflg=1



Cheers
Dave

The previous link has changed to:

http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/dpp/news/D ... cupressure

If it breaks again, you can go to: www.myfoxtampabay.com and put "accupressure" in the search window. An ad will come up first.

Dave

Mate you don't by any chance know anything about the leg/knee muscles and common injuries do you?

Hi

I know a bit. I’m going to be putting a posting later on covering some of them. Just a few pointers first. It’s a lot of info, but it’s very important to know how your muscles work. That way you can get a picture in your mind’s eye as to what is going on.

The muscles in our bodies are all supposed to be balanced. What does this mean ? Take for instance our arms. There are two main muscles in our upper arms. The biceps and the triceps.

http://www.bartleby.com/images/A4images/A4biceps.jpg

Muscles work in opposition to each other. This means that one contracts [ gets shorter ] whilst the other one expands [ gets longer ]. For instance, when you stand straight and take a single weight in the gym in your right hand, and raise that weight up towards your chest, two things happen: First, your biceps contracts, secondly your triceps expands. These both happen together. On the way down, the opposite happens. The biceps expands and the triceps contracts. If both muscles were perfect [ no knots, same strength etc ] your arms would be perfectly straight when they hang by your sides. Most people would say “Well of course they do”. Ah, but stand sideways to a mirror and let your arms hang down loosely. Look at the top part of your arm [ above the elbow ]and the bottom part of your arm [ below the elbow ]. Both parts should form a perfectly straight line from your shoulder down to your fingers. For most people, they will not see that. They will see a slight “crooked” angle at the elbow. What has happened ? When most people work out, they work the biceps more in the gym than the triceps. We say that the biceps is the opposing muscle to the triceps and the triceps is the opposing muscle to the biceps. Every muscle has an opposing muscle.

Take a look at his arms:

http://www.elements4health.com/images/s ... dbcurl.jpg


He’s in for some serious elbow and shoulder pain in about twenty years.

When a muscle gets stronger, it gets bigger in diameter [ around ] and gets shorter in length. The muscle bulges. When the biceps gets stronger than the triceps, it pulls more on the arm and causes that crookedness. Take a look at body-builders, 99% of them cannot get their arms straight [ bye the way that will turn into arthiritis at the elbow joint later later – more about that on another posting ].

When a muscle is stronger than it’s opposing muscle, we call that a “MUSCLE IMBALANCE”.

So what’s all this got to do with leg injuries ? Our legs and knees work the same way.

Let’s take the muscles on the front of the leg and the muscles on the back of the leg.

When we raise our right leg up, the muscles on the front [ the quads ] contract , and the muscles on the back of the leg [ the hamstrings ] expand. When we put our leg down, the opposite happens.

If our quads and hamstrings were perfectly balanced, when we stood straight, there would be equal pressures on the knee front and back, and we would feel no knee pain. Now, there are also muscles to the left and right of the knee which if perfectly balanced would keep the knee cap in the centre. There are muscles attaching to the top and bottom of the knee cap, and they keep it centered up and down. It’s when the knee cap gets pulled one way or another that problems occur. Soccer players get problems with their knees because of some muscles being stronger than others from the way they run and kick the ball.

In other words, if each muscle was as strong as it’s opposing muscle, then everything would be fine.

If the muscles on a joint are imblanced, then stress gets put on the joint. There’s a protective material called “cartilage”inside the joint, as well as nerves. When too much unbalanced pressure gets put on the joint, cartilage wears away and nerves get pressed against.

http://www.aclsolutions.com/images/Seif ... uscles.jpg

http://www.daviddarling.info/images/ham ... uscles.jpg


So, if all the muscles are balanced, can we still get pain ? Unfortunately yes. If a knot builds up in a balanced muscle, it will cause the muscle to contract or shorten. That has the same effect as if it were unbalanced.

To get relief from joint pain, we need to do two things:

1. Get the muscle strength balanced all across the joint.

2. Stretch all the muscles around the joint so they are all at normal length.

The last area to look at is this: if the top of your body and your pelvis are tilted forward, that will put pressure on your leg muscles and cause pain.

BALANCE MUSCLES IN TERMS OF STRENGTH

STRETCH MUSCLES SO THERE ARE NO KNOTS

GET THE BODY TO A NEUTRAL POSITION.

Let me know exactly where your pain is and also when it happens [ e.g. putting on shoes, lifting something, after a run etc ].

You can post here or send me an e-mail.
I know this has been a lot of material, and I don’t know if I’ve put it across well or not, but I’ll be breaking it down more in the weeks to come.

Shin splints occur in a very important muscle called the anterior tibialis and I’ll put a posting on that later.

http://www.eorthopod.com/images/Content ... tomy02.jpg



Dave

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ETJRlVhjcc

http://www.drabelson.com/

There are some great videos in that last link.

I've reviewed hundreds of videos on joint problems, and have found these guys to be really excellent. They have a great understanding of what is going on in the human body. Those are real bodies. A similar exhibit will be in Orlando soon, and I'm hoping to go and see it. I've been invited to the cadaver and dissection lab at University of South Florida in Tampa and hope to make it over there. Once you see how muscles connect, it really helps with working out problems.



They say a great [ but often wrong ] thing here that many people say: " Doctor, it hurts here, please treat me here".

Many, many times, the area that hurts is not the CAUSE, but rather the SYMPTOM.

I have great respect for doctors, but many of them do not understand this, especially when it comes to back pain.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology [ MIT ] is creating a center of excellence at the University of South Florida, Tampa for artificial limbs, artificial vision etc. The idea will be to train doctors to understand engineering and engineers to understand some aspects of medicine. I've been asked to help in this process, and once I'm well hope to do that.

In order to use the robot on the video, Al Meilus [ the bloke who works on me ] examines you and then tells you which muscles to work based on how you are standing and how you walk and what imbalances you have.
He and some engineers from Lockheed Martin [ same people that make the C-130 ] are working on a scanning system [ like a supermarket scanner ] that will scan your entire body, then compare it to an “ideal body” in a database in the computer. Al is programming all his knowledge into the system, so that once all the imbalances are shown, the computer will automatically tell you which muscles to work.

Dave

PM Sent Dave, many thanks. Also much respect for what you have done, both in serving and also in overcoming a bad situation.

Thanks

The only thing I ask of anyone whom I help is that they "pass-it-forward". In other words help someone else, even if it is only words of encouragement.

It makes my blood boil when I see young blokes coming from the wars severely injured and ending up like third class citizens in filthy wards in NHS hospitals.

When I was injured, I had absolutely nobody to help me for the first four months. I couldn't tolerate daylight for some reason, and had my wife put black garbage bags on the windows. To get to the toilet, I had to crawl out of the bed on my stomach. I would lay there in a ball for eighteen hours a day. My spine had been twisted in three places and the muscle spasms nearly made me come off the bed. I swore that if I got through it, I would do my utmost to help others.

When I started to get better, I contacted Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington DC and offered my services to help those with spinal injuries. There are three programs that I have used to get better and have x-rays to prove it. All three use "non-conventional therapies".
I spent three months calling every department in the place trying to get someone to listen. I called the Chaplains' Dept., Admin etc. Nobody was interested. I was furious. Finally I just screamed at some clerk "Are you f!@#$%^g interested in helping these boys, or do you want me to call CNN right now and tell them what a bunch of c$%s you are ?"

One minute later I get put in touch with a colonel. Can't say too much, but he was in a position to really do something. He did nothing and then blocked my calls and e-mails.

Fortunately after meeting Al Meilus, we managed to get hold of a congressman who has been great. He has sent Al a bunch of veterans who have been told nothing more can be done for them. He's helped all of them. Hope by the end of the year that he'll be working on injured servicemen, especially burn victims.

When a limb is amputated, people to shift their body weight. This then causes muscles to tighten up. These tight muscles can then cause pain. They can also cause the spine to twist and then cause disk and back problems. It's a spiral, but it can be broken. Bed sores are another thing. Proper massage and stretching can really help. Al's robot can lengthen the tight muscles.


Dave

If you go this link, and look at the section called "Let's go bowling with Lenny", there is a interview called "knee pain" I'll be covering more of this in another posting, but you can get some useful checks in it.

http://www.meilus.com/PublicityRadio.asp

Dave