Last night I was out for another one of those excursions to town that required a bicycle for the trip back home after the bus stopped running. This one was a presentation by the Arthritis Foundation on "Living with Knee and Hip Pain" which was of interest to me because I've had joint pain in my left leg going back fifteen years (before I started bicycling). Actually, the bike ride may have been more valuable for this purpose than the lecture, which mostly covered generally-known information. The best-practice advice is: keep your weight down, exercise, eat healthy, stay active.
When I was in my forties the pain in my foot, knee, hip and back seemed to flare up with my menstrual cycle, and sometimes became pretty debilitating and frustrating. It's somewhat better now that I don't have PMS anymore, but still a chronic thing.
Recently I've been feeling a bit proud of myself because, even after fifteen years, I can still throw my leg over the seat of my bicycle, and most likely the reason I can, is that I just keep doing it several times a day, several days a week.
Which reminds me of a bit of technical advice I've learned over the years. Commuters often fall into a very set routine, down to always going in and out of doors walking on the same side of the bike (to avoid bashing the door), and always approaching a preferred parking spot from the same side. After a while I noticed that I was getting sharp, painful twinges in my right knee, and my left leg was much more limber than my right. When I checked what I was doing, I found that, besides habitually mounting from the right side of my bike, I was standing with my foot perpendicular to the bike and twisting my knee slightly as I kicked the other leg over. I retrained myself to take turns mounting from the left or right side so both hips get a regular stretch-out, and try to remember to either point my foot forward a bit, or to rise up on my toes and turn on the ball of my foot as I throw my leg over the saddle, to avoid twisting my knee.
It's normal to have one leg stronger or more flexible than the other, but I hope these habits will help balance things out, besides preventing injury from unconsciously doing the same painful thing over and over again.
One item of new information from the Arthritis Foundation lecture concerned glucosamine and chondroitin. According to the lecturer, new research shows that these supplements are not harmful, but don't work. This was reassuring to me because I'd tried them for about eighteen months several years ago. I had read up on glucosamine before trying it, and the information I had claimed that it stimulated an enzyme that promoted growth of new cartilage. Later I read another article claiming that glucosamine alone could cause new cartilage to grow on top of damaged, brittle cartilage, which would create a joint lining that would be even more prone to crumbling. This article recommended taking the chondroitin supplement in combination with glucosamine, which would stimulate another enzyme that would break down and carry away old cartilage to allow new growth on a strong base. It sounded reasonable at the time, so I tried it for a while but then stopped after losing my job, because I hadn't noticed any change and couldn't afford the $50 for two bottles of pills. Still, I've had fleeting fears since that I'd done something that might actually cause more damage. I was glad to learn that I was only wasting my money.
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