[tonyarkles]

I was, for a long time, in the "follow the statistics" camp until about 5 years ago when I did an experiment because of an HN comment. My wife has had low-key GI problems for years. I read a random comment in a thread here about a specific L. Reuteri strain that BioGaia sells and how it had cured someone's IBS. I thought "why not, what's the worst that could happen?" and ordered a bottle. Two weeks into taking it daily, she comes to me with this look on her face. "What?" "I think that stuff you ordered fixed my guts." "What?!"

It lasted for about 18 months and then she started regressing while travelling. As soon as she got home she took another month long course and has followed a similar cycle since then. A couple week dose lasts 18-24 months and then needs a reset. It's possible it's all placebo, I have no idea. But as an intervention, that first round was a shockingly good quality of life improvement.

[mathgladiator]

Based on my wife's improvements, our neurologist is now recommending what we are doing. Im working with my wife on balance now since she has an asymmetric leg strength issue. Low and behold my dumb bro science thinking is working. We are about to do a brutal leg day together.

[tonyarkles]

I’m smiling, both because your wife is improving and because of the asymmetry thing.

After my second knee surgery, I asked the surgeon about physio. He didn’t really think it was necessary for the kind of surgery I had, but when I insisted he shrugged, said “sure”, and made a referral to the place on campus (surgery was through the university hospital). Physio folks did an assessment, basically said “you don’t really need anything”, gave me a few stretches and sent me on my way.

Soooooo ok. I could walk. I’d get gentle aching pain in my knee after less walking than I was ok with. I ended up putting together my own physio/rehab plan based largely on the concepts from Tim Ferris’s 4 Hour Body book. Before getting strength and endurance back, phase one was to assess and correct strength asymmetry.

Surgery was on my right knee. I’d been limping for a year before the surgery. I start doing “one-limbed” exercises to assess my strength and discovered that (not surprisingly) my left leg is much stronger than my right leg, but my right arm is much stronger than my left arm. I end up putting together a plan where I did:

- sets of 5-10 reps on the weak side, N/2 reps on the strong side. Once I can do 11 reps I increase the weight by 5lb.

- Every 10 days, do another asymmetry evaluation by doing each exercise to failure and tallying how many reps I did in each side. As soon as left and right match for a given exercise, start doing that exercise with both limbs at the same time instead of one at a time.

I do miss being in my 20s with the surging testosterone to help things. I went from limping constantly, to surgery, to getting sore after walking a few blocks, to running a 5km/3.1mi fun run in 24 minutes after 3 months of my homemade physio program, and still had lots of gas left in the tank.

[mathgladiator]

That's great.

I used to have this insane pain in my right quad. Urgent care and two different doctors kept me on a muscle relaxant that isn't exactly good.

I move and get a new doctor. He gives me two exercises after 3 days the pain was just gone.

I have countless stories like this from friends and families.

My wife and I just came back from the gym and doing a leg day. She did 50,000 pounds of volume. When she started, it was around 15k. I was at 75k and now im at 200k. It just feels so much better being stronger.

The sad thing is that you can't really hire a trainer that will push a wife like a demented husband. But her results are impressive and MS is a very humbling disease, but we are fighting like hell.