10 Quick Minutes to Get Answers for Feeling Good

“Health begins all conversations with older people,” said my friend, Bob. He also noted they talked and asked questions about health for too long. “Limit your talk on that subject to ten minutes, tops!”

Bob, was not a health practitioner, but he was a smart man. As a Chicago radio personality in the 1970s, he knew well what was interesting, what was dull, and what had no simple solution but would go on infinitum.

This week, a health question inundated my life: the status of my arthritic hips.

Some years ago I filled four days each week with Zumba and biking just as my Internist had looked at my x-rays and read, “advanced and severe arthritis.” To hold hip replacement at bay, he encouraged me to continue to exercise, stretch, and eat properly. He had cocked his head in a knowing way and said, “You’ll know when you need to have your hips replaced.”

Recently, warm weather encouraged me to get out of the house and be more active. I spread mulch and popped dandelions. I sat on the porch in the warm sun. I also felt chronic pain in my hips that increased and lessened, seemingly without cause. Determined to find the reason, I began a log in which I wrote down my daily intake of food and water and activities. I upped the water and, just because, I eliminated my nightly spoonful of Nutella. Still, I hurt.

I looked to my internist and trainer, and reached out to an acupuncturist and chiropractor-nutritionist for help with my health.

My physician pointed out the ice packs and hot tubs, however good they felt, only addressed my symptoms. I still had the mechanical problem of worn-out joints, which he noted as I tried to spread my legs more than 18 inches apart. Then he watched me bend and touch my toes with ease and asked numerous times if my back was sore or if I felt tingling in my extremities. I didn’t. He cocked his head, this time unsure. He said to the woman who ran two miles in response to a jumping snake that I didn’t sound like a candidate for hip replacement; but, “The hip surgeon, Dr. E, is conservative about his recommendations. Maybe you should talk to him.”

My trainer has been of great value in helping me walk without a limp or poor posture. When I complained of this volley of pain, she responded with IT-band stretches and releases for the psoas muscle. She changed out my Zumba and biking to less aggressive swimming / weights / walking. The five-minute morning stretch morphed into a 45-minute session of condensed foam roll / rubber-band stretches / yoga.

The chiropractic-based nutritionist took an x-ray of my intestines. He diagnosed the large black spots not as gas or passing food but inflammation in the cell wall. He recommended supplements for $138 to calm the inflammation; and for $295 he could provide a test to determine which foods were causing the inflammation. Besides feeling he scammed me about the x-ray reading, wouldn’t logic say that he should have tested the supplements to see if they caused me inflammation before recommending them?

I have yet to see the acupuncturist. I will schedule an appointment for next week. I know I need a different midset for dealing with Eastern medical practioners. It takes time and approaches the body’s health differently than Western medicine. It is not a pill-based response.

I feel unsatisfied that I don’t have a clear diagnosis and form of treatment for my health-less hips, but I am not without options (an amazingly consistent characteristic of medicine these days).

My mother’s solution would be that I have too much time on my hands and I should go do something to keep my mind off of it. What do my friends, young and old, do about pain?

My friend Bob would say, “Your ten minutes are up.”