Muscle Medicine: The Revolutionary Approach to Maintaining, Strengthening, and Repairing Your Muscles and Joints Read Free

tissues with “hands-on” manual techniques, and how, when the joint is seriously damaged, Dr. Kelly provides the orthopedic expertise. At the end of each of these chapters, you’ll learn how to work on yourself, to protect against injury or to come back from it. We describe a series of self-treatment techniques tailored to each of the body’s hot spots, based on the principles of Dr. DeStefano’s muscle therapy. Using your hands and a few simple items such as a treatment stick and a physio ball, you’ll learn to work directly on painfully contracted muscles to release the tissue and speed healing. Only when the area is no longer sore or inflamed will you progress to hot-spot-specific stretches to develop or maintain a healthy range of motion, and then strength exercises to build up resilience and protect against reinjury.
    As you’ll see, this book isn’t a laundry list or an encyclopedia of musculoskeletal injuries. (If you’re interested, plenty of books out there will give you the details of orthopedic procedures.) We’ve organized our information the same way we’ve taught ourselves to diagnose and treat problems, into three categories: Mostly Muscular; Muscle or Joint?; and Joint/Orthopedic. In the first group, which includes most problems, most of the time, injured muscle is generating the pain; any jointdamage that shows up on an X-ray or an MRI is incidental. The standard medical prescription for this group is rest and a couple of Advil. Our approach is to get at the underlying causes and then to lay out a program to treat and strengthen all the important muscles in the hot spot.
    With the problems that fall into our second category, Muscle or Joint?, neither the muscles nor the joint are working the way they’re supposed to, and it’s not clear who the most important bad actor is. Is the torn meniscus cartilage inside the knee the real issue, or can we bring the patient back to health just by working on the muscles that stabilize the joint? By putting these problems under a diagnostic microscope and always treating conservatively first, our goal is to eliminate avoidable surgeries.
    Patients in the third group, Joint/Orthopedic, have serious damage inside the joint that must be addressed, medically or surgically. Here, we work on the muscles before (prehab) and after surgery (rehab) to shorten recovery times and improve the outcome. Mostly Muscular, Muscle or Joint?, Joint/Orthopedic—this isn’t the standard approach to musculoskeletal injury, but in time we hope it will be.
    The good news about these injuries is that the necessary expertise is out there to fix them, even if it’s rarely collected under one roof—orthopedics to diagnose and repair joints; hands-on muscle therapy to promote muscle healing; and physical therapy/training to build up muscle and joint strength and flexibility. It’s the team approach. Working with the New York Giants for the past six years, we’ve seen the results when players have access to the best talent from these different schools of treatment. We believe readers should have access to the same expertise, even if they’re not (we hope) taking the same physical pounding as the Giants players.
    FIGHTING BACK
    Wouldn’t it be nice if all-around healthy living were all that was needed to ward off muscle and joint problems? But no matter how you live your life, it’s a near certainty that sooner or later you’ll have to deal with musculoskeletal ills—they account for almost a quarter of the visits to primary-care physicians in this country. Young people playing competitive sports put their frames under tremendous pressure, from contact-sports body blows to the grinding repetition in the endurance-sports world. Adults find themselves in office jobs that have become hothousesfor nagging aches and pains: lower-back pain from sitting glued to a desk; sore necks from improperly positioned computer screens; and overuse syndromes of the forearm—commonly if not always