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

accurately labeled carpal tunnel syndrome—from all that typing and “mouse” wielding.
    The lowest blow of all is that aging recreational athletes who maintain their cardiovascular fitness on the running trail, the tennis court, or in the gym are probably more susceptible to musculoskeletal damage than their couch-potato counterparts. (Ever notice how many social gatherings and dinner parties turn into a litany of “war wounds”?)
    Muscle Medicine is a manual about fighting back: how to make the right choices to address both healthy and damaged muscle, whether it’s on your own or with professional care. It lays out the first truly integrative approach to the care and repair of muscle and joint problems. Whether you’re an accomplished athlete, you want to maintain your regular tennis routine, or you just want to be able to play with your kids, or your grandkids, without back pain after a long day at the office, we want to be on your team.
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Dr. DeStefano
Every day, I treat patients who are convinced that the source of their pain is the damage inside their joint that shows up on an X-ray or MRI. A patient will come in and say, “Can you help me with my meniscus tear in my knee?” I’ll say, “No, I can’t help you with the meniscus tear, but I may be able to help you with the pain in your knee.” What people don’t usually understand is that in many cases, if we can get the muscles around the joint to move properly, the joint itself doesn’t have to be in perfect shape for the system to work without pain. That’s something I can appreciate. I’ve been in two serious accidents—once when a car hit me while I was training for the Ironman World Championships and once in a Manhattan cab crash—and I’ve got the chipped vertebrae and herniated disks to show for it. A year ago, the pain in my back and neck flared up so badly, my orthopedist was ready to bring in a neurosurgeon to work me up for disk surgery. I kept exercising, getting manual therapy, and applying self-treatment. Slowly, over a month, the contracted muscles in my cervical and lumbar spine let go their grip, and the pain went away. I’m not cured; I still have damaged disks. I may need surgery down the line, but as long as I’m symptom-free and maintain the health of my muscles, I’m fine.
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HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS: MUSCLES, BONES, JOINTS
    Before we talk about lifestyle issues or jump into the nuts and bolts of body problems, let’s first admire the machinery and come to a basic understanding of how it works. As we’ve said, muscles and bones and joints form one integrated system, and no one component is more important than another. Without muscles, you would be a motionless pile of bones; without a skeleton, you’d look and move more like a jellyfish; and without joints to control and stabilize the bones, you’d stumble around like the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz .
    MUSCLES
    The muscles under your conscious control—skeletal muscles—are the motors that drive the human system. (The smooth muscle that lines the organs and the cardiac muscle that keeps your heart beating are involuntary.) The muscles function in tandem. As one muscle shortens it exerts a pulling force, while at the same time itscounterpart relaxes. This simultaneous action of a contracting agonist muscle and a relaxing antagonist muscle powers all the movements of the body. That’s the case whether it’s a sprinter thrusting his lead leg forward (the massive quadriceps muscles in the front of the thigh contracting, the hamstrings in back relaxing) or you bending your finger to scratch your nose (flexor digitorum contracts, extensor digitorum relaxes).
    Controlling the movements of so many muscles is precision work that is initiated and coordinated in the brain. The process might seem as simple as turning on a light switch, but in reality, it’s a constant neurochemical conversation between the nerves and the muscles. That is, the brain oversees the production