Hildreth on Health: Cellular health and vitality through exercise
By Dr. Dewall Hildreth, D.O.
Published: Thursday, January 17, 2008 7:48 PM MST
This is the fourth and last session on hypokinetic disease, which is over-stress and under-exercise.
It has been quite a learning experience for me. Knowing everything I have been discussing is one thing, but mentally organizing it and putting it down on paper is another. It started out by musculoskeletal changes that take place within essentially all of us as we age. Then we discussed how these changes influence changes in our lifestyle and interests in the world around us.
After that, it became evident that relationships between musculoskeletal changes, including stature and appearances, slowly may influence our attitudes, our relationships with people we associate with and even our nervous system.
Much of the second and third sessions centered around the relationship between our musculoskeletal health and vitality and our general physical and mental health.
I went into research that has been done through the years relating increasing spinal degeneration and compression secondary to an increasing sedentary lifestyle, spinal maturity and the force of gravity, some of the important studies associated with relationships of spinal and other joint aging and internal visceral compromises.
The internal changes slowly begin influencing tissue and cellular oxygenation, digestion, waste elements, and even brain function. We came to the conclusion that there is a relationship between musculoskeletal health and mobility and internal visceral health and vitality. This session today is now, as I mentioned, on cellular health and vitality through exercise.
Every body function we experience, good or bad, is determined by cellular health. Healthy active cells require very specific surroundings. All of the 75-trillion-plus cells that make up who we are, are bathed in a sea of fluid. From this sea of extracellular fluids a cell acquires functional orders by way of nerve impulses and hormones. It depends on this extracellular bath for all of its nutrients and oxygen supply, and it depends upon the extracellular bath to carry away all of the toxic byproducts the cell has produced secondary to function. These functions may include brain activity, muscular movement, heart and circulatory demands, digestive functions, and so forth.
The happier each cell is, the longer it is going to live. A cell that is starving for food or oxygen or dying because it is living in a sea of toxic poisons, the more possibility there is that it may become an undifferentiated cell and become cancerous for survival.
This above process is slowly happening to all of us due to the aging process, but we don’t have to die by inches. I wonder if cellular exercise might aid in being the answer. Somehow we need to create a faster exchange and cleaning of the extracellular sea of fluid that all of the cells of the body live in. It appears there is a relatively painless way to accomplish this. The body is equipped to do just this, but not without movement. The lymphatic system, which covers every inch of the body inside and out, is intended to accomplish this.
The only problem is that the lymphatic system depends on muscular activity and movement to accomplish this. There is no lymphatic pump like the heart. Our muscular activity pumps the toxic, used, extracellular fluids back to the heart by way of the lymphatic channels and the heart then pumps it to the kidneys and bowel areas for elimination.
The heart re-supplies cells with a fresh clean solution of extracellular fluids loaded with nutrients and oxygen not unlike keeping a fish aquarium clean. This takes place in all parts of the body where there is activity and movement.
If there is none or minimal activity in certain parts of the body, then there is minimal exchange of fluids and the polluted extracellular fluids that the cells are living in remains. This also includes brain, eyes, hearing, and equilibrium.
Much in-depth research has led me to the possibilities of the medical or therapeutic trampoline or rebound therapy. NASA has done much research over the past twenty years in regards to the merits of the therapeutic trampoline. Their concern was spurred by the devastating effects of weightlessness.
Our bodies have developed around the importance of gravity. Therein lies the significance of the rebounder. The up-and-down movement of the trampoline increases and decreases the gravitational G’s approximately 8 to 100 times a minute. This is the key to not only muscular activity without trauma but the pulsating squeezing and relaxation upon the tissues from the rhythmic altered gravity force that is created by the up-and-down motion of the rebounder.
NASA found that this problem is more pronounced in infants, invalids, the elderly, and astronauts. Other research has shown that there can be benefit to invalids or elderly people that have trouble standing and post-surgical patients.
If it is possible for them to just sit on the trampoline while someone else is bouncing, they can experience improvement over a period of time. There have also been studies showing visual improvement and improved equilibrium while using the rebounder in certain ways.
Remember, all of the tissues suffer from the same increasing toxic extracellular fluids also. You may have heard me say before that if you don’t use it, you lose it, and that includes all parts of the body.
Somehow the total body has to be exercised and exercised in a convenient non-traumatic and consistent way. NASA found that the G force that was measured at the ankle was always more than twice the G force that is measured at the back and forehead while running on a treadmill, while on a trampoline the G force was almost the same at all three points.
I would be happy to be involved in a talk discussing the pros and cons of different exercises including the small therapeutic trampoline. My wife, Linda, and I have been using the small trampoline on a daily basis for about two months. Please call or e-mail if you want a more personal detailed evaluation and recommendation.
Contact Green Valley Dr. DeWall Hildreth at 625-1101 or cnhcgv@ yahoo.com. His column appears biweekly in the Green Valley News.