[lrnStats]

Mental health Tangent-

I wonder how far the American Medical Association/physicians have set back medical discoveries.

The traditional solution is Drugs. Some recommend exercise (although a friend recently couldn't get a prescription for Physical Therapy until after trying steroids for 2 weeks). Even fewer recommend diet changes.

Could this breathing method be a drug free solution to various psychological disorders? (Don't get me wrong, people may need drugs, but it's something to consider before a Physician gets someone addicted to Drugs for the rest of their life.)

It just seems like every industry has made huge strides in technological progress and scientific knowledge, then you have medical which is still unknown. Engineering and Medicine are both applied sciences, it seems either bizarre or corrupt that medical is far behind and has low quality outcomes, despite high costs.

[lotsofpulp]

> it seems either bizarre or corrupt that medical is far behind).

It’s not bizarre. It’s simply very difficult to conduct experiments with a complex subject such as human beings that can produce clean results linking actions to results.

[lrnStats]

But you can say the same about civil engineering. We don't know about macro effects until it's too late.

[spaceisballer]

I mean diet and exercise can have profound effects on your health. My personal experiences have been that doctors I have been to are likely to prescribe something and then toss in “also you should exercise and lose some weight”. I herniated a disc and basically my options were steroid shots or surgery. I opted for the steroid shots just to get rid of the constant numbness and pain down my leg. But there had been no real help on what to do now. “Strengthen your core” um ok thanks. All that to say a lot of time is spent treating the symptoms and not the cause. Meanwhile I’m stuck finding the cause and then trying to remedy it.

[abrichr]

Unless you sustained a back injury, the cause is most likely weak core and trunk muscles, which places strain on your spine. Therefore, strengthening your core and trunk is the solution.

I have had excellent results with reverse back extensions [1] and inversion table stretches and crunches.

Good luck!

1: https://youtu.be/3d9_W--eUcI

[lrnStats]

I definitely recommend Physical Therapy for that. They are Doctors but not MDs, they don't prescribe. They teach exercises, stretches and do massage and that crack that chiropractors do.

Physical Therapy is really what I need most the time, but when I was a kid I was taught to go see a PCP.

[tcoff91]

If you need some good guidance on strengthening your core and back I highly recommend Foundation Training.

book: https://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Redefine-Your-Conquer-Conf...

streaming workouts: https://www.foundationtraining.com/

[unishark]

Mental health (particularly psychiatric illnesses) is something of an outlier among medicine in terms of how limited progress has been compared to other disease categories.

As for physical therapy, I have also experienced a degree of reluctance in prescribing it. But in my case my doctor has always been even more averse to drugs (aside from things like tylenol). I think I had to go through a couple doctors visits worth of suggesting alternative exercises or other lifestyle changes first. Maybe physical therapy is just expensive and they were trying to protect me from the out-of-pocket costs.