What We’re Reading Now
Esther Gokhale studied biochemistry at Harvard and Princeton and acupuncture at the San Francisco School of Oriental Medicine. After experiencing crippling back pain during pregnancy and an unsuccessful surgery, Gokhale began her crusade to vanquish muscle and joint pain. The Gokhale Method and her book 8 Steps to a Pain Free Back are the result.
Esther Gokhale studied at the Aplomb Institute in Paris and traveled to parts of the world where back pain is virtually unknown. Her research took her to remote Burkina Faso, rural Portugal, and fishing villages in Brazil. What she learned in each of these places has changed the lives of thousands of people. Preserved in the movements of weavers, millers, and farmers in more traditional societies is ancient body wisdom that prevents pain and enhances health. Gokhale has brought these insights together in a step-by-step guide designed to help people suffering from back pain re-educate their bodies and regain their bodies’ natural posture.
Recent Titles on the My Body Odyssey Reading List
Dr. Steven Phillips has not only witnessed the agony and frustration of the many thousands of chronic Lyme and Lyme-related patients he’s diagnosed and treated over several decades. He’s experienced these agonies himself, as has his Chronic co-author, the science writer Dana Parish.
Phillips argues these illnesses are more accurately called “Lyme Plus” to reflect other pathogens at work alongside Lyme bacteria. Yet current testing methods for Lyme and Lyme plus are woefully inadequate, in Phillips’ experience. This leads to high rates of misdiagnosis and mistreatment for up to 40% of infected individuals not cured by a typical course of antibiotics.
Chronic is both unusually an unusually powerful memoir and a science-based wake-up call to the mainstream medical community which has yet to fully recognize the ravages of chronic Lyme and Lyme plus conditions.
Hear more from Dr. Philips in our podcast episode about chronic Lyme disease.
We make hundreds of movement choices all day long, whether we know it or not: Walk or drive? Sit or stand? Hip to the right or to the left? Heels or flats? So how can we make the choices that leave us feeling and moving—even thinking—our best? It starts the ways in which our body is positioned throughout the day, whether working, exercising, or resting.
Rethink Your Position is a guide to everyday anatomy and alignment—part by part. Daily aches and pains can feel unavoidable, but we can start feeling better by moving better. And moving better starts with our individual body parts, and the relationship between and among those parts and the forces or loads they experience.
Bestselling author, speaker, and a leader of the Movement movement, biomechanist Katy Bowman, M.S. teaches movement globally and speaks about sedentarism and movement ecology to academic and scientific audiences. She has worked with a wide range of non-profits and other communities to create greater access to her “move more, move more body parts, move more for what you need” message.
More Titles from the My Body Odyssey Reading List
Being Mortal
Dr. Atul Gawande
Excerpt: “In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.”
When Breath Becomes Air
Dr. Paul Kalanithi
Excerpt: “Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee
Excerpt on cigarettes: “It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America – a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance’s link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety – one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars.”
Excerpt: “But the story of leukemia–the story of cancer–isn’t the story of doctors who struggle and survive, moving from institution to another. It is the story of patients who struggle and survive, moving from on embankment of illness to another. Resilience, inventiveness, and survivorship–qualities often ascribed to great physicians–are reflected qualities, emanating first from those who struggle with illness and only then mirrored by those who treat them. If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.”
Excerpt: “In 2005, a man diagnosed with multiple myeloma asked me if he would be alive to watch his daughter graduate from high school in a few months. In 2009, bound to a wheelchair, he watched his daughter graduate from college. The wheelchair had nothing to do with his cancer. The man had fallen down while coaching his youngest son’s baseball team.”
Why We Sleep
Dr. Matthew Walker
“After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.”
“Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection.”
“Inadequate sleep—even moderate reductions for just one week—disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic.”
“the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. The leading causes of disease and death in developed nations—diseases that are crippling health-care systems, such as heart disease, obesity, dementia, diabetes, and cancer—all have recognized causal links to a lack of sleep.”
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Slow Medicine
Dr. Victoria Sweet
Breath from Salt
Bijal P. Trivedi
The Body
Bill Bryson
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent
Excerpt: …“As an academic neurosurgeon and reporter, a big part of my job is to educate and explain. I have learned that in order for my messages to stick, explaining the why of something is just as important as the what or the how. So throughout this book, I explain why your brain works the way it does and why it sometimes fails to deliver what you’d hoped. Once you understand these inner workings, the specific habits I encourage you to adopt will make sense and more likely became an effortless part of your routine.
Truth is, even when it comes to our general physical health, there is very little explanation in public discourse of how our bodies actually work and what makes them work better. Even worse, there is a lack of agreement among medical professionals about the best foods to eat, the types of activities we should pursue, or the amount of sleep we really need. It is part of the reason there are so many conflicting messages out there. Coffee is practically a superfood one day, and the next it’s a potential carcinogen. Gluten is hotly debated continuously. Curcumin, found in turmeric, is touted as a miracle brain food, but what does that really mean?…
You are going to hear this word a lot in this book: lifestyle. If there’s one fact that’s increasingly becoming apparent in scientific circles, it’s that we are not doomed by the genetic cards we were dealt at birth. If a certain disease runs in your family, you can still stack the deck in your favor and avoid that fate. Our everyday experiences, including what we eat, how much we exercise, with whom we socialize, what challenges we face, how well we sleep, and what we do to reduce stress and learn, favor much more into our brain health and overall wellness than we can imagine…”
Chronic: The Hidden Cause of the Autoimmune Pandemic and How to Get Healthy Again
Dr. Steven Phillips MD and Dana Parish
Dr. Steven Phillips has not only witnessed the agony and frustration of the many thousands of chronic Lyme and Lyme-related patients he’s diagnosed and treated over several decades. He’s experienced these agonies himself, as has his Chronic co-author, the science writer Dana Parish.
Dr. Phillips recalls the low point in his own battle when he was “confined to my memory-foam mattress prison for a full year, ultimately requiring twenty-four hour care, unable to turn over in bed or sit up on my own….”
From this nadir he persevered on his own path to wellness and toward a better understanding of the complexities of tick-borne Lyme infections triggering chronic illnesses affecting tens of thousands of North Americans each year.
Phillips argues these illnesses are more accurately called “Lyme Plus” to reflect other pathogens at work alongside Lyme bacteria. Yet current testing methods for Lyme and Lyme plus are woefully inadequate, in Phillips experience. This leads to high rates of misdiagnosis and mistreatment for up to 40% of infected individuals not cured by a typical course of antibiotics.
Chronic is both unusually an unusually powerful memoir and a science-based wake-up call to the mainstream medical community which has yet to fully recognize the ravages of chronic Lyme and Lyme plus conditions.
Books from our protagonist guests
Cracked
Jim Barry
In his own words, Jim Barry recounts his experience going from a man who “had it all” -a successful engineering career, a beautiful family, great health, a love for adventure- back to square one after fracturing his skull and incurring a cerebral hemorrhage while mountain biking.
The injury left Jim with permanent brain damage, including limited vision, hearing, and proprioception. He must now use a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Yet Jim refuses to give up. After pouring his energy into a lengthy rehabilitation, he has slowly but surely improved his speech, coordination and stamina.
This determination to triumph over injury became apparent at the Maine Lighthouse Ride this past September, where MBO watched Jim take on and complete the 40-mile ride on his “trike”, an adaptive three-wheeled bike, interviewing Jim and his wife, Mary, both before and after the ride.
And They Shall Run…
Carol Crutchfield
Carol Crutchfield, who we met at the 51st Falmouth Road Race, wasn’t always a runner. But in her book And They Shall Run, she describes how she became a runner, providing insights to new runners just getting started about how they can learn to love running, too.
“The main thing is, your mind’s your worst enemy,” Carol told us in her interview before the Falmouth Road Race. “So you gotta make yourself get out the door, and that’s the hardest thing.”
This book highlights Carol’s experience of running her first Boston Marathon, the role her faith has played in getting her “out the door” to run, and provides some important dietary and cross training advice for runners, new and not-so-new.
