How to Add 3,000 Steps to Your Day Without Getting Up From Your (Active) Chair
Every physician knows that exercise is the best medicine. If doctors could write a prescription for exercise every patient would get one before he left the office. Hypocrites understood this well,...
Mediation is perhaps the quintessentially internal pursuit: the mind turned inward, examining itself. So, it’s perhaps surprising that almost every meditation tradition pays close attention to th...
New Research Shows Back Pain Isn’t Helped by Opioid Drugs. What’s a Doctor to Do?
A recent paper published in the premier medical journal The Lancet1 underscored again just how poorly low back pain is understood. In their paper Opioid analgesia for acute low back pain and neck...
Real-Time Feedback from Automated Sensors Improves Health
Real-time feedback is how humans learn. Babies babble, listen to themselves, and then modify their babbling to match the babbling of their parents, eventually becoming fluent speakers of whatever ...
The Gravity Paradox: How Evolution Redirects Gravity to Hold Us Up
Gravity holding us up? Sounds silly. We can all feel gravity pulling us down, and we all have experience with falling down. Every physics book shows this vector, a representation on the page of ...
How We Move Changes Our Very Bones
“It’s not so much what you know as it is who you know”. Often quoted in life and in business, this truism sometimes turns up in surprising contexts. Take human evolution. As a puny species with...
Could Simply Changing Your Chair Add Years to Your Life?
The profound difference between sitting and ‘active resting’ Note: Although I’m an academic researcher, because I too suffered from back pain for quite some time, so I’m hardly a disinterested ...
Ergonomics and Its Discontents
Although the word ergonomics joined the English language less than 100 years ago, the idea of ergonomics goes back over 2,000 years. Hippocrates himself weighed in on how a surgeon should set up h...
A paper recently published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine will revolutionize our approach to exercise. Here’s the executive summary: if health is your goal, then visits to the gym aren...
Balance is simply how our spines and limbs dance with gravity. But really balance is much more than this: balance is what defines our species. We are the most graceful of bipeds, able to naviga...
Standing vs. Sitting I talk to lots of people about their office setups, but one recent conversation still haunts me. A few months ago, I was chatting with Anette, a very earnest 30-somethi...
What I Learned at the National Ergonomics Conference
A few weeks ago, I attended “National Ergo”, an ergonomics conference that’s held once a year in Las Vegas. I was there to give a lecture on the problems caused by our currently available “ergonom...
Can Fidgeting Help You Live Longer?
The health benefits of fidgeting Likely you know someone who is a natural-born fidgeter; you may be one of these souls yourself. If so, you’re in luck: while it’s not easy to be a fidgeter ...
What Is an “Exercise Chair”? (Besides an Oxymoron)
Why do we sit? On the face of it an “exercise chair” seems an odd juxtaposition of words: don’t we sit to avoid the exercise that would be involved in some other posture, such as, say, squa...
This Just in (again): Passive sitting is bad for us.
Exercise cannot undo the harms of passive sitting. Evidence has been accumulating for years that passive sitting presents a unique health risk, different from lack of exercise. Importantly,...
You Need to Move More! According to Doctors and Scientists
The data is in, Americans move less than ever before, and this is extremely bad for our health. Our human ancestors used to travel up to 10 miles a day when we were hunter-gatherers according to D...
Changing how you sit might help you avoid back surgery
I was a trauma surgeon for many years and I loved everything about it. Trauma surgery is unique in surgery because it is a specialty that is almost pure surgery: very little need for elaborate ...
Can how you sit help lower your cancer risk?
We know not only that moving is good for us but also that sedentary behavior independently contributes to a host of bad health outcomes: obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the most frequently...
Your Back Pain Isn’t In Your Back
Your Back Pain Isn’t In Your Back Pain is a universal experience, the result of ancient neurologic pathways evolved to keep us safe by alerting us to injury. While pain is universal, however, i...
Are 10,000 steps too many? “Ten thousand steps” is now a well-ingrained idea that even epidemiologists embrace, but not because it’s true. Physicians have long known that walking is importan...
The Paleo Diet is Debunked, But What About Paleo Sitting?
The Paleo Diet is Debunked, But What About Paleo Sitting? The paleo diet has had a good run, but for a bad reason. The underlying idea that our modern lives don’t match our hunter-gath...
Staying Awake at Work Staying awake at work has been a problem since the beginning of work. So, it’s not surprising that an array of anti-somnolence work-arounds have been tried over the mil...
Can Active Sitting Help with Acute Low Back Pain?
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard P. Feynman I’ve been interested in the benefits of sitting actively for sometime now. N...
Posture is a seemingly uncomplicated attribute of our every moment. It is simply the habitual way we array ourselves in response to gravity, and is as individual as our personalities. But, becau...