Your Life Vest Is Under Your Seat

Coming home from vacation this notice was in front of me for five long hours on the plane.

Every time I noticed it I was reminded of an article I read recently called "Sitting Is the New Smoking".  

 

That article along with the instruction in the plane "Your life vest is under your seat" should be a wake up call for all of us with sit-down jobs and/or online obsessions.  

Getting up and getting moving is the new life vest!! It's under your seat. You just have to get up and use it.

 

I talked to my sister about linking these two thoughts. She said "It's a stretch," which is also exactly what we need.

You have to get up and walk around to save your life.

This is even more important for those with chronic illness and more so with a musculoskeletal (MSK) disease. There should be a special pamphlet given to MSK patients with a warning, similar to warnings on cigarettes.

 

amckinnon   Suggested for knowledge transfer brochure

When I was diagnosed with RA years ago fatigue and pain were always with me. It seemed totally logical not to stress my joints or to do more than I felt was possible. After fifteen years of very little exercise it should have come as no surprise that my bone density was decreasing rapidly.  

BUT it was in fact a huge surprise. I know the doctor can't tell you everything at diagnosis but I would have expected some health care professional to tell me the facts: Since RA affects the bones there were steps I needed to take to prevent osteoporosis. Some of these steps could include taking calcium, doing some type of exercise to help my bones and taking vitamin D. 

My first reaction, after shock at another diagnosis, was anger. Why did I not know this? Maybe I was reading too many mysteries and not enough medical information but "what the doctor knows" was not readily available before widespread use of the internet. What I knew about my particular area of chronic illness I found in magazines and the newspaper.

It just never hurts to state the obvious. This is why a more co-ordinated approach to treating inflammatory arthritis, like Dr. Irwin Lim's clinic in Australia, is such a good idea. As you see from the link he has a vision! 

Here's another post from Dr Lim about osteoporosis in case you want to know a little more.

 

knitted by Cathy Beattie

With a shortage of rheumatologists internationally, and so many of us with prioritized problems and lists of issues longer than our appointments, we need to coordinate with those wonderful people known as allied health care professionals. That would include physiotherapists, occupational therapists, dieticians, orthotists, exercise physiologists and others.

When you read medical advice that suggests a team of healthcare professionals can be a big plus with chronic problems, one of the groups they were thinking of was people with musculoskeletal problems.