Increases aren’t always beneficial, but often “bigger” means improved function in exercise physiology. More heart beats and a larger stroke volume in physical training leads to… [Read More...
Would you agree that things function better when they are in proper alignment? The base of the skull sits atop cervical vertebra number 1, the atlas. The atlas sits atop the axis, and every subsequent cervical vertebra sits atop the one below it. This alignment… [Read More...
In both my classroom and my clinic at the university where I work you will find many anatomical models. Some are entire skeletons, others are single extremities, and still others show the inner workings of joints. Some have… [Read More...
Feet come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Just the sounds of the nomenclature assigned to some of their anatomical variations probably distress patients in the foot clinic: pes planus, pes cavus, hallux valgus, hindfoot varus, metatarsus adductus, and an array of others. The sole, or plantar surface, is… [Read More...
Posture, in general, is rapidly degrading across cultures that are driven by consumerism (few who are reading this live outside those cultures). What’s to blame? Increasingly sedentary lifestyles, poor physical fitness, furniture that values design over… [Read More...
The sodium half of a sodium chloride molecule has a bad reputation in healthcare when we think of the amount of salt in a typical diet. True enough, in many ways it is detrimental to good health. We spend lots of time and money educating patients about… [Read More...
When I started as a sports medicine student in the late 1970s, rehabilitation after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction in the knee followed a much different prescription than it does today. Athletes who underwent this surgical procedure were immobilized in a fiberglass cast spanning from their groin to their toes. Twelve weeks later,…[Read More...
Blood pressure is a fundamental physiological measure of well-being. Its dual values represent the pressures in millimeters of mercury that the blood exerts against the walls of the arterial vasculature in contractile and refilling stages of the cardiac cycle. In order to obtain… [Read More...
Instability of a joint can be quite debilitating, particularly in the major joints of the lower extremity. Lateral ankle sprain and anterior cruciate ligament rupture have received an extraordinary amount of clinical and research attention over the past several decades because the former is the most common traumatic joint injury of all-time and… [Read More...
Doctors are often maligned—playfully or otherwise—about their stereotypical dreadful handwriting. Whether on a prescription slip, in a patient’s medical chart (though thankfully computer technology has positively impacted this particular problem), or anywhere else, “bird scratching” and other colorful… [Read More...