Whacked the President with a Single Stick

A forgotten and dangerous cousin to modern day fencing, single stick fighting involves a short and inflexible piece of wood. Ouch. Early 20th century notions of physical therapy were obviously different than today as evidenced by President Theodore Roosevelt using single stick fighting as a way to recover from a carriage accident. Here’s how the New York Times covered his unusual PT sessions:

WHACKED THE PRESIDENT WITH A SINGLE STICK

Gen. Wood Raised a Lump on Mr. Roosevelt’s Forehead

Special to the New York Times.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 29–President Roosevelt has not been wounded in the forehead with a rapier wielded by Gen. Wood, nor has he been swinging a broad sword at that officer, as reported in New York today; but he has been whacking his military friend over the head with a single-stick, and Gen. Wood has been returning the compliment. As a result the President is wearing a bruise on his forehead just over the left eye.

For the last month the President and Gen. Wood have been accustomed to repair daily, or almost daily, to a room in the White House where they are free from interruption and have a bout at single-stick. This ancient English exercise used to have as its point the drawing of blood. Neither the ex-Colonel nor the ex-Lieutenant Colonel of the Rough Riders has aimed a making this point, but both havve confined themselves to developing their skill with the weapon and getting as much exercise and fun out of the game as possible.

Notwithstanding this, it is impossible to play with single-sticks without occasionally getting hurt, and both the President and his ex-superior officer have daily given and received some pretty severe raps. Lumps have appeared at frequent intervals on the head of each. The one which the President received the other day, however, was worse than usual and more visible to the casual observer. As a result the wildest kind of rumors were started, finally culminating in the broadsword and rapier story. This led to the discovery of the secret which the President and his friend have guarded so successfully for a month or more.

The PT must of worked since, ten years later, not letting an assassination attempt get in the way, Roosevelt was able to deliver a 90 minute speech after being shot in the chest.

Getting Online Hearing Aids

SilverDia2_CMYK_1024x1024I was born with crappy hearing. High frequencies such as high pitched bird calls and bleeping electronic devices run above my hearing range. Worse, I will often confuse “s” sounds with “t” sounds thus turning my perception of ordinary conversations into a never ending avant-garde poetry reading.

Good hearing is part of a good life. Friends and relatives get frustrated when they have to yell or repeat things. And there’s research indicating that hearing problems can contribute to dementia later in life.

Generally I’m not a fan of Silicon Valley’s “disruption” tactics, but if ever there was an industry that needed shaking up it was the hearing aid biz. Until just a few years ago hearing aids were expensive, costing thousands of dollars each for a device that’s far simpler than our much cheaper smart phones. For most people in the U.S., insurance won’t pay for hearing aids.

When I first got a hearing aid ten years ago from HearX, at $2,000 per ear, I could only afford one. It’s an outrageous price since, according to the New York Times, the device probably costs around $100 to manufacture. It’s just a microphone and speaker with a modest amount of signal processing. The computer on which I’m typing out this blog post also has a speaker, a microphone and much more sophisticated audio signal processing capabilities. It can also play cute cat videos and costs half as much as one hearing aid. And why, if I just went to my doctor for a hearing test, am I paying for someone at HearX to do the exact same test?

When it came time to replace the overpriced hearing aid which HearX would no longer service, I checked out Costco. Their hearing aids were half the price of HearX but they still made you go through another hearing test. A friend (annoyed with my bad hearing) sent me an article on new online hearing aid services and I discovered that they were half the price of Costco at around $500 to $600 an ear. I ended up going with Audicus and I’ve been pleased with the two hearing aids I purchased. I went to my doctor and got a hearing test (she also did an MRI to make sure that there was not something else going on). I sent the hearing aid test to Audicus and a week later they sent me a box with two hearing aids.

With my Audicus hearing aids the part that goes in the ear is a one-size-fits-all plug as opposed to the custom earmolds used by HearX. This cuts down on costs and means that you don’t have to go in for a fitting. I haven’t noticed any significant difference in terms of audio quality or comfort between my Audicus hearing aids and my HearX hearing aid. I’ve been using my Audicus hearing aids for two years with no problems.

I have a few important tips if you’re considering a hearing aid:

  • When I first got hearing aids a friend who is an audiologist told me to wear them all day everyday even if I was alone. This is because they take awhile to get used to. For me I was hearing sounds I had never heard before some of which were unpleasant.
  • Even when you get past the early phase you should still wear them as much as possible. I’ve been bad about this lately. It’s important to remember how important communication is for ourselves and for our relationships.
  • And don’t worry about aesthetics. Hardly anyone will notice that you are wearing them. People don’t look at your ears when they are talking to you they look at your eyes. I went with the silver colored mode above rather than a flesh colored hearing aid.

On the Vulnerabilities of Combination Locks

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Back in December, just a few days after Kelly came home from the hospital, I went to the gym for a badly needed workout. I put my wallet and car keys in a small set of lockers located on the weight room floor. Those lockers (pictured above) have a built-in combo lock where you can set the combo yourself. Unfortunately something went wrong. When I went back to retrieve my belongings the combo I had set did not work. I asked a staff member to find the master key to open the locker. He informed me that the boss had it and that he wouldn’t be back until after the holidays. I panicked. How would I get by without my keys, credit card and driver’s license? Then I remembered an idle afternoon back in the summer when I attempted to learn how to crack combo locks.

The efforts of that afternoon paid off. After around five minutes of practice on the other lockers I figured out how to open the lock and I manged to retrieve my belongings.

Combo locks all work the same way. The internal mechanism has three or four wheels that must align to open the lock. More expensive combo locks have false gates to make them harder to crack. The cheap built-in locks at the gym had no false gates. Opening the lock was as easy as turning the numbers until I felt a subtle resistance. The process reminded me of playing a musical instrument. All it takes is a little finger dexterity and practice.

Should you find yourself in a similar situation, you’ve got a couple of options for opening a combo lock:

  • With a shim:

  • With some math:

Both the shim and the “math” methods take practice. I have not been able to open the lock I’ve been practicing on with either of these techniques. Of course, the easiest method is just to pry open a locker with a screwdriver or crowbar. And many locks can also be defeated by drilling them.

Lastly, let’s say you have an open combo lock but have forgotten the combo. You can figure it out by peering into the opening:

In addition to adding a James Bond villain skill to your mental toolkit, consider this post as a warning. Don’t leave valuables in a gym locker. I could have easily opened the other lockers, pulled out wallets, copied down credit card numbers and put the wallets back. My fellow gym goers would not have known anything was wrong until their credit card bills arrived.

My Favorite Minimal Shoes: Vivo Barefoot

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Vivo Barefoot Stealth II Men’s Running Shoe

Yesterday I wrote about the solution to my plantar faciitis problems: going barefoot around the house and, when not at home, wearing minimal shoes. I’d like to focus in this post on the minimal shoes I chose: Vivo Barefoot.

This post might seem like a shoe ad but I want to emphasize that I’m not being paid to say this, nor have I received any free shoes. I’m just a fan of Vivo Barefoot. Unlike those strange Vibram shoes, Vivo shoes look like normal shoes.

As I noted in yesterday’s post I was guided by the advice of physical therapist James Speck. He suggests four considerations when choosing shoes:

  • Flexible Sole
  • Little or No Support
  • Minimal Toe Spring
  • Flat or Low Heel Height

img_7359By flexible sole he means that you can roll the shoe up into a little cigar. Minimal toe spring means that the shoe does not turn up towards the toe (look at your feet–they don’t turn up so why should your shoe?). Arch support weakens your arches. And heels? Why should fashion trump health?

Vivo Barefoot sells running, hiking, casual an even semi-formal shoes. With just one click I can order a new pair of shoes and never have to set foot in a mall ever again.

They also make the only decent looking running shoe I’ve ever found. As I’ve said before, the design of most running shoes look like what would happen if a dog ate and then barfed up a bunch of florescent pool toys. This is not even to touch the issue of the evidence-free cushioning and stability control the big shoe companies think we need.

Please don’t get me going about the running shoe industry and the horrible magazines that support them. I’ve noticed, in the past year, that the powers that be have deemed that the minimal shoe trend is “over” and that we now need “maximal” shoes like this atrocity:

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I guarantee that if you run or walk in a maximal shoe like this for any length of time you will end up with knee and foot problems. This is due to the principle of risk compensation. Make a shoe soft and you will land harder with each step. Wear a minimal shoe and you will tread lightly and, with each step, your foot will grow stronger.

On Speck’s suggestion I took a “cold turkey” approach to the barefoot/minimal shoe lifestyle. It felt strange and was painful at first, but gradually the plantar faciitis that I was suffering from has greatly dissipated.

Vivo Barefoot isn’t the only minimal shoe company. Kelly is fond of her Lems.

Do you have a favorite minimal shoe? Leave a comment!

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A Cure for Plantar Faciitis?

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He’s the world’s crankiest man and one of Twitter’s most entertaining trolls. If he’s right it means most of what we’ve been taught in school is wrong. I’m talking about Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. You can apply his ideas to many areas of human knowledge, everything from the economy to beekeeping. In this post I want to look at how his notion of “antifragility,” systems that benefit from shocks, applies to a little understood malady that effects 2 million people in the U.S. every year: plantar faciitis (I’ll call it PF for the sake of brevity).

PF is an inflammation of the plantar facia, a band of tissue that connects the heel to the toes. It causes a sharp pain that makes walking extremely painful. Risk factors include tightness in the calves, overuse and obesity. I’ve had three cases of it in the past ten years, two brought on by running and one by fencing.

I’d cured my PF last time by going barefoot. That time, it worked quickly. When it didn’t work quickly this time around, I gave up and decided to seek the advice of medical professionals, including a sports medicine specialist. I didn’t trust my own experience. This was a mistake.

The standard medical advice for PF is rest, immobilizing the foot, constant arch support (I was never barefoot unless in the shower or pool), orthotics, needling and cortisone shots. In my my most recent bout with PF, I tried all of these things for a year and a half, following my instructions to the letter, and none of them worked. One of those strategies, immobilization in a boot with crutches made things much worse and, I believe, set my recovery back by months.

If my experience is any indication, I’m going to step out on a limb and suggest that if you have PF you shouldn’t go to a doctor.

I’m not going to let alternative medicine off the hook either. I also made the mistake of seeing a chiropractor. She pulled my hand around, using it as a kind of augur with which to indicate which worthless, expensive supplements (including rancid cod liver oil) I needed to buy. She also waved a kind of pimped-out laser pointer around my heel. That was also pointless. In the end I talked to another chiropractor I trust who is an ultra-marathoner and fellow PF sufferer. She admitted that she can’t fix PF and that’s why she’s a good chiropractor.

The Cure
What seems to be working is giving my feet a heavy dose of antifragility. I’ve stopped babying my feet: no orthotics, no rest, going barefoot as much as possible.

It was painful at first but I took it slow and now I’m walking and doing light running. This is exactly the opposite of what the majority of podiatrists, sports doctors and orthopedists will tell you to do.

What sent me back on the barefoot antifragile path is the webpage of a San Diego based physical therapist named James Speck (thank you Kathy Turk for that link!). Here’s what Speck has to say,

Plantar fasciitis doesn’t develop from overuse or too much stress on plantar fascia. It happens when the wrong kind of stress replaces the good kind of stress that the foot needs to remain healthy. The aim of treatment, therefore, should not be reducing stress on the arch. Instead, treatment should focus on changing the types of stresses being applied and encouraging normal function of the foot.

If Taleb ranted about feet instead of Ben Bernanke, I suspect he’d agree.

A Disclaimer
The usual warning about correlation not implying causation could apply here and certainly applies to many supposed PF cures.

PF tends to resolve on its own eventually and perhaps we can end up thinking that whatever the last crazy thing we did is the cure. But I have a feeling that Speck is right about restrictive footwear being a primary cause of PF. If you’ve got PF check out his background on PF, why common treatments don’t work and how to treat it.

I also want to be clear that this is not an indictment of all of Western and/or alternative medicine. Let’s just say that the virtue of Socratic ignorance is lacking in both sometimes.

Tomorrow I’ll do a post on what shoes I’m wearing (when not barefoot, of course). In the meantime, my feet are now more like the happy foot side of the happy foot/sad foot sign.

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