McKenzie method for low back pain is a starting point. It’s stretching, maybe strengthening I can’t remember. Hip flexors, hamstrings, calves are usually tight and can cause back pain. The front and back of the legs have to be balanced or they’ll pull your pelvis out of neutral. Modern day sitting doesn’t do us any good, tightening all the posterior compartment muscles in the legs.

Core strengthening is important for good posture. Being aware of your overall posture is also really important too. Yoga is fantastic for stretching, posture, and strengthening.

Caveat: sometimes it’s structural and this stuff may only help somewhat but chronic pain is treated with multiple modalities. If this stuff doesn’t improve it significantly along with NSAIDs, follow up with your primary care doc.

How I know: I’m a physician who screwed up his back and had to figure all this out and now I teach my patients how to treat their back pain. I also use physical therapy liberally because it’s fucking awesome.

Oh they’re definitely not judged the same. There’s a reason DOs interested in the more sought after specialties rarely try for MD programs. When you have a bunch of alpha nerds who base their self worth on test scores and other stuff like that, you get arbitrary stratification. And I’ve seen good doctors fail STEP tests and shit doctors who graduated from Harvard. There’s always those situations when some happen to be good at the stuff a system deems worthwhile but suck at being a person and vice versa.

A lot of DOs go to Osteopathic medical schools because getting into MD schools is crazy competitive. It’s just another path to becoming a doctor that’s an option if you don’t get into a US MD school. The medicine curriculum is basically the same between the two. Though I’ve worked with a bunch of DOs who believe in osteopathy and practice it.

So I’m a physician and I support most things people do to import their health but I do try to make sure they’re fully informed. In terms of fasting, this cohort study found an adverse association between fasting and cardiovascular death. There are limitations to the study (self-reported diet, etc.) but it followed 20,000 people for 8yrs which is pretty good. Definitely need more study in this area, especially considering the complexity of human metabolism. Here’s the highlights from the study but the full text is available at that link:

• People who followed a pattern of eating all of their food across less than 8 hours per day had a 91% higher risk of death due to cardiovascular disease.
• The increased risk of cardiovascular death was also seen in people living with heart disease or cancer.
• Among people with existing cardiovascular disease, an eating duration of no less than 8 but less than 10 hours per day was also associated with a 66% higher risk of death from heart disease or stroke.
• Time-restricted eating did not reduce the overall risk of death from any cause. An eating duration of more than 16 hours per day was associated with a lower risk of cancer mortality among people with cancer.

Not videos that I know of but maybe? I Iove both of these though:

Not Another D&D Podcast. Hour long or so a week with interspersed non-play episodes. Hilarious improv people, great characters, lots of jokes, some good emoti stuff. Bunch of prior campaigns to listen already.

Pink Faux Hawk. Newish podcast playing Shadowrun. Funny, over-the-top action movie play style. One player has health issues so they’re oe on uploads lately but I still love it.

Ha, sounds like you might have delivered in rural areas like I did.

Amazon drivers (the ones in budget or Amazon cans, not flex in personal cars) do okish. I just quit working for a third party company Amazon uses to shield them from liability and unions because it’s miserable work but the pay was $22.50 which isn’t too bad. The workload is crazy, it’s all rush rush rush, and they don’t care about you at all though so fuck them and Amazon. The drivers would appreciate the tip, they’re generally hardworking and decent people.

I’ve been using Autosync for years with good results first with Drive and Dropbox and now Pcloud. Supports a lot of different cloud services though not Proton which is why I haven’t started using that yet.

Autosync

Oh yeah, a lot of common causes need to be evaluated plus we need to assess if the person should be on blood thinners due to the risk for a clot in the heart that can travel to the brain. I’ve admitted quite a few patients for new onset Afib due to their underlying causes as we didn’t think they were good to go home. Admittedly most people would be fine and we can be too cautious due to legal liability and physician anxiety over bad outcomes but considering the possible consequences, it’s not a terrible thing to do that.

Afib, which commonly causes palpitations, should be seen in the ER if you can’t get in to your PCP that day. Could be caused by a lot of things and a work up is warranted including lab work, echo, etc if new.

If you in the US, you’re primary care doc’s office wil havel an after hours number to call if you’re not sure. Unfortunately you’ll likely be told to go to the ER if it’s heart related because we have to err on the side of caution since we can’t evaluate you very well over the phone. Urgent cares are hit or miss since they’re staffed mostly by mid levels who may or may not be well trained but they can handle sore throats/colds, simple cuts/infections/foreign objects, STD testing, etc. depending on their facilities. I’ve been to one without basic labs which is crazy. I’d suggest calling you doc’s office first to see if they have acute visit slots that day. A lot will.

Yeah, a good physical therapist will push you past your limits. From personal and professional experience, mental limitations will hold you back when you’re rehabbing. With my less uptight patients I’ll tell them physical therapists don’t give a shit about your pain and discomfort, they’re there to get you better. I love those fuckers, they do wonders.

I’m sad to see you go.

Is it actually hilarious? Did you fall out of your chair, laughing so hard you shit yourself? Or are you just performing for the internet, being the cool guy? Looking at your profile you’re trying hard to be “the smart guy”. Or you may just be a sad troll, lashing out in an attempt to foist some of your misery on those around you but also avoid the consequences of your actions. Hard to suss out with certainty but happy to keep fucking with you if you want to keep going.

You may be right a out that but I’ll keep trying. I’ve seen some truly egregious care provided by midlevels who were hired for primary care because hospital admins only care that midlevels can bill 80% of a physician but they only have to be paid a third of a physician salary. Unfortunately people aren’t able to differentiate between all the people in scrubs that they see so I recommend supporung Physician for Patient Protection , a great organization that lobbies against unsuper mid-level practice.

And as for chiropractors? I have little against them except for neck adjustments and adjusting childre. Necks are fragile and so are the arteries in it and kids are the just straight up flexible, they don’t need placebos to feel better.

I disagree with the use of doctor for anyone who hasn’t completed medical school and their field’s respective post-graduate training. I’ve seen the term watered down to the point that anyone tangentially related to a physician-led field uses the term. Chiropractors, nurse practitioner, administrators, etc. etc. It leads to confusion in patient populations. I’ve had patients in the ER tell me that their nurse practitioner was equivalent to me in temrs of training which is absolutely not the case. I finished 3,000 hours of clinical rotations by the end of med school and another 10,000 hours of training by the end of residency. Patients are lucky if an NP has 500 hours of clinicals before they’re hired to provide “primary care”. The training an optometrist has is specialized but not to the level of an opthalmologist so using the same term muddies the water and makes it difficult for people to discern the difference.

I worked with European PhDs at the NIH and the impression I got was that they don’t use it regularly or even prefer it. Small sample size but at the upper echelons of their respective fields.

An opthalmologist is an eye doctor. They go to medical school and do a residency for extra training. Optometrists have doctorates in optometry meaning they do four more years of school after their bachelor’s. They can call themselves doctor because in the US that’s the convention for doctorate’s (in Europe ony medical doctors use the term). There’s avast difference in intensity, depth, bredth, etc. of training between the two. It’s easy to miss the difference if you’re not familiar with the system.

UK narrow boats and canals. YouTube figured out I like nerdy people being passionate and interesting about the nerdy things they nerd about. Do you think I’m gonna go on a canal boat tour when I go to England? You’re god damn right I am.

Well shit, I grew one town over from there. Pretty sure that’s right by our cliff diving spot on the Croton Falls Reservoir. I never went in it most kids in highschool knew some “facts” about that mine.