Ergonomics: Computer Workstation Set-up

Ergonomics: Computer Workstation Set-up

The basics of health are simple, seemingly too simple for most people to believe.

We are, as all living things, hardwired for one thing only; survival. And, health is nature’s most basic survival mechanism. Health is nature’s default or set-point.

Nurturing our own health means taking active steps to optimize our own specific genetic potential for health. The foundation of health is based upon the daily and consistent lifestyle choices we make, throughout our lives, in terms of how we think, what we choose to eat, and how we use our bodies.

Each of these broad categories can be broken down into smaller sub-categories. For instance, how we think includes how we handle all stress, how we cope with life’s challenges, the caring relationships we have with family, friends and co-workers, etc.

What to eat is best summed up by Michael Pollan: “Eat real food (not processed crap), not too much, mostly plants.”

Biomechanics refers to how we use our bodies. Biomechanics is based on using ideal body posture at all times: sleeping, sitting, during exercise, in all work and play activities, etc.

Ergonomics has to do with how we use tools and set up our workstations to support good posture; to minimize unnecessary and harmful chronic and/or repetitive strain to our bodies.

Biomechanics and ergonomics all begin and end with good posture.

The following video is a great tool to help with computer workstation setups.

Featured Blogger

Featured Blogger

Blogging:

"Never before have so many people written so much to be read by so few." (Katie Hafner, NYTimes)

I have been in communication with EverydayHealth.com, and if all goes well, I may be one of their featured bloggers.

Below is my intro and first submission. I will keep you posted.

Introducing: Hardwired4Health

I am writing this blog to help me express, and share, my evolving understanding of human health.

My opinions and original articles are based on my 25 years working as a chiropractor and health coach to thousands of patients and are supported by the literature I have read including articles, books, printed and on-line news, etc., and the information I have learned in the many seminars I have taken over the years.

As a holistic health practitioner, I see myself primarily as a health coach; as a guide to better health. It is my mission to help transform the lives of my patients by educating, motivating, coaching and successfully treating them so that they can live full, active and healthy lives.

My goals in writing this blog are simple:

1. To provide information to motivate you, and more importantly, to ignite positive action for you, to reclaim your health and the health of your family.

2. To expose and explode perpetuated medical misperceptions, mythologies and lies that distract us from our goal of health, undermine our instincts, and disarm us from taking personal responsibility for our health and living healthy lives.

How to BE healthy is no mystery, and is within grasp for most of us. After all, health is our set-point, our birth-right. Or, as the author/activist Michael Pollan so eloquently states, “Nature’s default is health.” Why so few of us believe that, and why health eludes most of us, is the bigger mystery.

The key to unraveling that mystery begins and ends in examining the sources and content of our beliefs that drive our habits. The bottom line is that health, for the most part, is a lifetime, lifestyle habit.

My blog may be challenging. I am honest, direct and blunt, and I will support my writing with links to respected sources.

As Morpheus says to Neo in The Matrix: “Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing else.” And, as they say, the truth isn’t always pretty. But, knowing the truth, and acting on it, is the only way forward.

The GAIA Theory

 The GAIA Theory

The similarities between our planet and our bodies are amazing, with profound implications for both.  

In the 1960’s James Lovelock proposed what has become known as the Gaia Theory.                                 

He defined Gaia as: 

a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.  

In short, that planet earth is a delicately balanced, self-regulating living system (ecosystem) striving for homeostasis (balance) to support life on the planet. 

This mirrors the definition of human health: our body’s genetically programmed capacity to maintain homeostasis, and its innate ability to adapt to chemical, physical and emotional stressors that challenge that balance. 

In short, our bodies are delicately balanced, self-regulating ecosystems, striving to maintain homeostasis (health) to support our life. 

“In a way, to be human before the modern industrial era was to be an environmentalist.” Man lived in awe of, and in harmony with, nature; respectful of its power and grateful for its life-sustaining bounty. The industrial revolution heralded man’s disconnect from nature and the balance that sustains it. In the process, and in our wake, we have depleted its resources and polluted, challenging Gaia’s homeostasis. 

Our planet is sick, and its temperature is rising. 

As the disconnect with our planet widened, so did the disconnect with our own bodies and our health. We have become poor stewards of both.  

What the industrial revolution has done to our planet the medical-pharmaceutical and processed food revolution has done to our bodies. 

We routinely and unthinkingly consume and pollute our bodies with drugs and chemically laden processed and artificial foods and apply a chemical orgy of personal body-care products while we drink polluted water and breathe polluted air. We have challenged our body’s ability to maintain its homeostasis and, as individuals and as a species, we are sick. 

What do you feel like when your temperature goes up 1 degree? Out of sorts? 2 degrees? Definitely not yourself. 3 degrees? Sick, and seeing your doctor. 4 degrees? Very sick, with medical interventions and possible hospital admissions.  5-6 degrees? Emergency measures are being implemented to lower the fever to save your life. 

The rising temperatures on our planet are having the same effects. 

As Native American Chief Seattle said: “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” 

Or, as some graffiti I saw long ago said: “What we do to the earth we do to ourselves.”

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In our bodies every cell functions independently, interdependently and co-dependently. The same is true for all aspects of our planet. This is the concept of holism expressed in the Gaia Theory. 

But, how can we expect someone who eats chemical foods, smokes, lives a sedentary indoor life and routinely consumes drugs for what ails them; someone who has no respect for the delicate balance of their own ecosystem, to understand that the melting of the polar ice caps and the loss of species has implications for the planet’s ability to support life on earth? 

As author Micheal Pollan wrote in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Nature's default is health. If we stop the devastation, and if it hasn’t gone too far, nature will restore the balance to support life on the planet. 

Make no mistake about it: the planet is not in peril. Life on the planet, as we know it, is. 

If you stop the devastation of your body with unnatural and toxic chemicals and give your body what needs in a pure and sufficient quantity, the inevitable result is improved health. 

To save life on our planet, we must first save ourselves.