As a family physician who has worked in primary care clinics for 20 years, I entered the field of medicine since it seemed to be the area where one can have the most influence and impact on healthy lifestyles. I offer the prescription of daily exercise to almost every patient who sees me. I ask them what activity they can and like to do. A common reply: “Well, I can’t run…” My response is always,
“Tell me a little more about that.”
The conversation flows from, “I have a bad back, knee, ankle…” to “My last doctor told me to do something safer” to “It’s too difficult and painful.”
I continue, “Tell me some more about that.”
We are now at minute 14 of the traditional 15-minute office visit, and yet this is not even the main reason they came to see me.
So how much training did I get in medical school or residency specific to evaluating, preventing and rehabilitating running injuries?
The answer is almost none for me and for most physicians, and what we did learn was always based on treating a symptom, not the underlying cause. For example, an unhealthy diet of too many bad carbs can often to lead to and foot and leg injuries; it’s the body own response to the real cause.
I am here to tell you that you were designed to run, and yes, you can run. There is no magic pill or cure invented for prevention of chronic disease. In certain high-risk situations, there are medications that reduce risk of future events, but true prevention is not allowing the condition to evolve.
Diabetes and heart disease prevention? The evidence is strongest for the largest prevention being in the form of the daily walk or run. It doesn’t have to long or involve much time or preparation. Thirty minutes a day is a great start for many, even if it’s only walking.
The current natural running movement is the confluence where doctors, other health professionals, coaches and runners are now joining and discovering the prevention prescription.
The Natural Running Center is here to help all runners. The NRC provides physicians, healthcare providers and runners with the tools to educate and inspire runners to relearn how to run like they did when they were children and to improve their health.
Why is this movement occurring now? In most large-scale changes involving health issues, we have waited for the “top-down” declarations. This is where academia announces important discoveries and tries to move the discovery into a physician’s daily practice. This is a slow process and on average it takes 10 years for an important medical discovery to become routine in a clinician’s practice. The elements of modern treatment of heart attacks took this amount of time to become routine in emergency departments.
The movement toward a healthier and sustainable way to run is occurring in a large-scale “bottom-up” revolution. This is where the people are the gathering force. Runners like myself who have discovered the benefits of barefoot, legions of Chi Runners, the thousands adopting minimalist shoes and followers of Chris McDougall’s best-seller “Born to Run” are all figuring out how to run again and spreading this message up into the health care offices. It has taken the works of Harvard’s evolutionary biologist Dan Lieberman and McDougall to bring to a large public audience other important scientific work and writings supporting the principles of proper movement patterns and the dysfunction triggered by elevated heels and overly cushioned shoes.
The NRC’s two primary goals are to:
Support runners with accurate, clear and understandable information and tools to help them make a transition to better running mechanics.
Establish a site for the health care community to learn and evolve along with runners.
The NRC will be a meeting place to advance dialogue and action towards new ways of thinking about healthy movement and running. It will provide resources and training so runners can make a safe, injury-free transition. To ensure that the natural running movement reaches a scale that can have large, long-term impact, the NRC has engaged scientific leaders in trans-disciplinary fields to communicate to the growing audience in a forum more accessible, relevant and readable than the scientific literature database.
Because the problem is this:
-Up to 70 percent of runners get injured every year.
-Traditional modern running shoes have not proven to decrease injury or provide meaningful protection against it.
-The prevalent medical model of treating these injuries rarely factors in the physiology, functional movement and biomechanics in addition to evaluating the anatomical part injured.
-Direct costs of treating running injuries for some may start to outweigh the costs of the illnesses that the physical activity aims to prevent.
Rates of obesity and associated chronic diseases have skyrocketed in children and adults. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention documents that more than one-third of adults in the United States are considered medically obese and therefore more likely to develop major chronic diseases such as Type-2 Diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
In summary, I go back to a quote from the late George Sheehan who wrote in 1975, before I ever thought of running for sport or health,, “If athletes were given less care and more thought, the doctors might come up with some original ideas on why illness persists, why injury doesn’t clear up. If more non-physicians could be induced to lend their ideas and talents, we might see a completely new approach to sports medicine.”
We are finally seeing the perfect alignment of health professionals, teachers, coaches, writers, media, shoe industry and, most importantly, legions of individual runners who are discovering a better way and learning how to accurately teach the methods. The NRC provides physicians, healthcare providers and runners with the tools to educate and inspire runners to relearn how to run like they did when they were children and to improve their health.
And please me visit the new flagship Natural Running Center Store in Shepherdstown at Two Rivers Treads. We now have six partner stores nationwide– and growing.