More bones, more feet!
From some of my prior blogs you might know that I have a sweet spot for the following things: energy work with bones through energy, and the energy effects of the barefoot style of running and walking. So the following items got my attention.
Bones- more than we thought
Back in the ancient days of biology, you know, the days when I took biology in college, we were taught that the function of bones was to hold our shape and protect internal organs. Advanced courses added more sophisticated things like producing blood cells and immune cells in the bone marrow. Other than when they broke, bones weren't of much importance.
That's all changing. Bones, it turns out, regulate a bunch of stuff scientists hadn't thought of like blood sugar and insulin and even reproduction, including estrogen and testosterone! And we know that the principle here is that whatever we think the body does, it probably does more than that.
So all that lovely energy work in bones that we have developed? Could make you more fertile... so watch out!
Feet and Backs-
The New York Times source on the new info on bones, also had a lovely interview with Evolutionary Biologist Danial Lieberman on his research about barefoot running in human evolution. He points out the roaring obvious-- that we did not evolve wearing running shoes!
He does a nice job of laying out the evolutionary argument for barefoot running. I would only note, as fond as I am of barefoot, that the "craze" has lead a lot of folks to rush out and injure themselves. You have to prepare your musculature and movement coordination to function differently. If all your movement experience has been while bound into springy boxes (i.e. running shoes) for years, don't expect your body to be capable for running without them, instantly!
Lieberman also comments on something that has seemed to me true for quite a while, but he does so with more authority and face validity than I have on the subject. Responding to the shibboleth* that the commonality of "bad backs" indicates that we were not evolved for upright posture:
If that were true, natural selection would have its
toll and we’d be extinct. What is more likely is that many people sit in
chairs all day, get no exercise, and thus have weak backs. We did not
evolve to sit in chairs all day.
Clients I work with have been told by physicians, who should know better (in the sense of think better), that their back pain is because the human back was not evolved for upright gait and posture. If their physicians actually understand evolution, rather than using it quasi-scientifically to explain what they don't really understand, they would know better.
In other words a scientifically sounding term like evolution, is being used to provide a glib explanation for something.If you invoke "evolution" than you had better have an explanation for how your explanation makes sense to the process of natural selection.
Obviously, physicians are not the only ones who do this. A lot of health conscious, new agey folks like many of us here like to quote science when it suits us, even when we don't understand the implications of the science for the rest of our cherished and illogical beliefs! Oh well. Science when it suits us, and not when it doesn't. Let's be careful out there...
*"Shibboleth" means "a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth." It's my current favorite word for "accepted wisdom that is utter crap."