Podcast 202: Repetitive Stress and Work-related Injuries

Martin Pytela and Scott Paton have been getting together regularly to talk about alternative health issues for a long while now. So long, in fact, that they’ve ranked up over 200 different episodes for you to feast your ears on. So if this is your first time tuning in, you’ve got a lot to look forward to!

This episode features some spirited discussion on the topic of repetitive stress and work-related injuries and how they can be avoided – very eye-opening stuff. You might be surprised to know the true causes of some of these problems.

Often the problem is simply not enough nutrients reaching the right places in the body, when they’re needed.

Platinum Plus Essential Amino Acids designed to provide the body with the essential foundation for health, that studies are showing is just not there these days.

This product has already helped thousands of people who used to suffer from chronic pain. The problem is that even if you already eat a diet that is large in protein, it may not be used properly by your body. This product ensures you are getting the absolute best value nutritionally out of everything you eat. It really is remarkable!

Podcast 202: Repetitive Stress and Work-related Injuries

SCOTT: Welcome back everybody! You are listening to the Life Enthusiast Podcast, we are restoring vitality to you and to the planet! I’m your co-host, Scott Paton, along with the founder of the Life Enthusiast, your health coach Martin Pytela! Hi Martin, how are you doing today?

MARTIN: Doing great! Thanks for asking! And today my bee in my bonnet is repetitive stress injury.

SCOTT: Oh, cool. I say that because my background was in the grocery industry for years and years and years. And one of the things that just totally amazed me was the number of cashiers who would start wearing these big contraptions on their forearms and wrists and hands because they had carpal tunnel syndrome.

MARTIN: Yes, that’s very common for people who work in assembly lines, the cashier, of course, all they do all day long is just drag groceries across the scanner, pick it up and lift it at  an awkward angle. But even office workers, using a mouse at the computer, spending hours mousing around, editing pictures, or something like that. It can put a serious strain on your hands and wrists.

SCOTT: Yeah, I know what you mean, because I find that happens with me a lot, so I end up taking breaks and doing other things so that I don’t get worse.

MARTIN: Yes, indeed. We have this wonderful article on the website that says: muscles and other tissues that support joints weaken when they’re not moved enough, causing joints to lose shape and function. That’s the ‘too lazy,’ right? The opposite of that is that if you’re overusing through repetitive motion, you will get into what’s called cumulative trauma. The pain that you have in the wrist is really inflammation. The pain is the symptom of it, and the inflammation is caused by the repetitive activation of that one particular muscle. So if you’re using it too much, you’re not giving it time to recover.

SCOTT: So we have two options, we have the ‘not using something enough’ and we have the ‘using it the same way all the time,’ right?

MARTIN: So if you’re not using something, you’re going to essentially start falling apart from lack of use. That’s an argument for saying: you have to exercise. If you don’t exercise, you can atrophy and you fall apart. But you have to exercise in a balanced way, broad term exercise, like yoga that works your whole body, or walking that targets all joints and muscles.

SCOTT: Instead of the same way, constantly, same movements over and over. These people get varicose veins in their legs because they don’t move. But you can always move at least a little bit, walk around the office, if you have to stand all day, you can do a few squats or walk in place for a few seconds…

MARTIN: …or maybe the company could provide them with a high stool and a standing desk or something. Everybody who works either the factory floor or retail, you know, people who spend eight hours on their feet standing… standing is one of the more difficult jobs, I would choose walking for eight hours over standing still for eight hours.

SCOTT: Yeah, it is hard to be standing in one place for hours.

MARTIN: Exactly. Anyway, so standing is one of the repetitive motions, you know, it’s actually engaging the same group of muscles all the time.

SCOTT: So what happens when you get this repetitive motion damage?

MARTIN: Well, the inflammation that sets in as the result of the overuse of the specific piece of tissue or the muscle. So we need to try and figure out how we could reverse it. And there are specific nutrients that your body needs to deal with it. One of them is magnesium. We talked about magnesium many times. Calcified tissues, hardened tissues, tend to go into inflammation and stiffening, and if you don’t have enough magnesium to counteract it, you will have a problem. I remember my own problems way back when, when I was first getting into trouble with mercury toxicity, my feet started to fall apart, it was labeled plantar fasciitis, which really all that means is that the fascia, the wrapping on the outside of the muscles, is becoming inflamed.

MARTIN: And it’s probably related to the carpal tunnel, which is also inflammation in the wrists, I remember that my wrists were hurting a lot, too. I was seeking help first in the orthopedic surgeon’s office, that was quite comical, they gave me an injection of corticoid hormone, steroid, and after the guy did it, I said: “is that going to fix it?” and he said: “no, it’s going to give you relief for maybe six weeks.” Indeed it did. Of course, the application itself hurt like heck, because this was a long needle that was inserted right into my heel and right to the bone where the muscles attach. Man, that hurt when the fluid was being injected there! But I didn’t go back, because it just didn’t solve anything.

MARTIN: So then I started going to a chiropractor, and indeed, that was a lot of help. And it was just crazy, I would go there every week and he would adjust both of my feet and my hands. If I didn’t go, if I missed an appointment, I was in so much pain. So I had to keep coming back every week. That was kind of working, but I wasn’t getting ahead of it. So only years later I realized that’s the repetitive stress that I was suffering from. I was working in a physical job at that time, working in a sawmill, so I was on my feet and I was lifting all kinds of weights. That was the physical cause of the injury, but the physiological cause of the injury was actually the toxicity in my body. So, full circle, we arrive right back at suggesting to people: If you are engaged in a job that causes repetitive stress, you should consider detoxification, especially from heavy metals and other industrial toxins as a means of preventing this sort of dysfunction. I’m starting to sound like a ‘one tune Jack’.

SCOTT: If you’re doing the same thing over and over again, you have a choice between not doing that and doing it. Sometimes that means you might have to leave your job. If you want to keep the job, you gotta make sure you do the proper warmup, that you try to vary your activity as much as you can, and do it in different ways, so that you’re not causing yourself repetitive motion injury, or you get enough rest periods in to repair and recover. We know that the part of your body that’s going to be breaking down first is the weakest part of your body.

MARTIN: Exactly. There are actually supplements that help with the situation. We have these on our website, and they are Free Form Amino Acids. You can have a chronic protein deficiency, despite the fact that people eat protein, there might be a deficiency of the amino acids because the proteins are not digested correctly. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins, and there are some essential amino acids we have to obtain from our food. When you supplement these free form acids, you’re actually giving the body a chance to build the correct proteins. Because of this stress injury, the body is trying to fix it by building scar tissue. When the scar tissue is being introduced, it’s causing things to adhere to one, essentially causing it to have more friction. In this case, we need to add some supplements, enzymes, and when you take those, they will actually eat away the scar tissue, the fibrin, and return the body back into a full function.

SCOTT: Very cool! What products would that be specifically?

MARTIN: Well, our Platinum Plus Amino Acids are just free form, meaning that they have been pre-digested into individual components, and these are the essential amino acids. There are eight amino acids that the human body cannot create, cannot assemble within itself, it has to ingest it from the outside. And if your digestion doesn’t work correctly and doesn’t disassemble say the chicken that you ate into the components, all of a sudden it just doesn’t have the necessary bits and pieces that it requires to assemble a human protein, like a piece of a muscle or a skin tissue, or repair whatever is getting overused in the body. These amino acids have fancy Latin names, like arginine, cystine, lysine, and others. When Dr. Vickery was designing this product, he looked at the profile of a basic chicken egg, the protein of a chicken egg, and looked at the ratios of these individual amino acids. These ratios are specifically set to mimic a protein that’s used in living creatures.

Not long ago I was looking at some other amino acid supplements and I was checking the label of one that said: “Each capsule contains,” and then they had a list of 20 amino acids, and each capsule had a hundred milligrams or each. I was thinking: who was the designer here? Certainly not a conscious creature, just some kind of a spreadsheet designer. But anyway, the amino acid is the building block of every tissue in the human body, every enzyme, every protein. So because we supply these individual components, the body is able to assemble whatever it requires to make the necessary repairs. So once you start using these, the aches and pains go away, because the damage that wasn’t previously repaired is now being repaired. There’s an interesting product that we also have available called Recovery. It is a very appropriate name, because it helps to recover from just about anything, any injury, any physical damage, whether it’s caused by a sports injury or work overuse, or even by a car accident, or whatever that may be.

SCOTT: So how does Recovery work?

MARTIN: Well, by supplementing the necessary nutrients into the body. There are multiple components to it. When you start taking apart the individual bits and pieces, you’ll see, for instance, one of the ingredients is TMG (trimethylglycine), that thing is really good at lowering the pain of any injury.

SCOTT: Naturally lowering it, not causing you to be numb, right?

MARTIN: Oh yeah, these things are not disconnecting your nerve without fixing the cause for the pain. We’re going after the pain itself, fixing the cause, not trying to just suppress the symptoms.

SCOTT: So this Recovery goes beyond simply addressing symptoms.

MARTIN: Yes, the whole point is dealing with the cause of the injury, most likely it’s in the mechanical side of things, when you overuse or overstretch a muscle, or if you were in a car accident and ended up with whiplash, or if you had to have surgery, or when something accidentally got ripped or torn or separated… Regardless of the cause, the reversal of that is always the same.

SCOTT: It contains Nutricol, which is proposed to increase the structural integrity of connective tissue structures and maintain optimal tissue hydration. We’ve talked about how important it is to be hydrated in the past. And it’s a cell structure-oriented health science that addresses the pathogenic factors of generative and inflammatory conditions, I’m reading this directly from the Life Enthusiast website. So basically if you’ve got tissue that’s degenerating or inflamed, it addresses those issues. Nutricol is basically a bioflavonoid mixture of grapes and EGCG from tea. These plant antioxidants have been shown in numerous clinical studies to profoundly affect the health of cells.

MARTIN: There are many claims on the label, there is a lot of research behind this product, but from an ordinary guy perspective you just want to know that this makes the pain go away, and it helps the repair of the tissue.

SCOTT: As opposed to just making the pain go away and let the body continue to degenerate.

MARTIN: Yeah. That’s the big, big difference between these natural functional tools for helping the body build and re-build itself, and taking some kind of painkiller that will relieve you of the pain, but it will do nothing for the rebuilding of the tissue. A bottle of Recovery costs $60, a bottle of Aleve that you’ll end up using in a month is probably 12 bucks. So there’s no pretending that this does cost more, but the good thing is that when you take Recovery, you actually rebuild the body and repair it so that you actually have a chance of fixing it to be as good as new. Aleve does nothing other than just stop the pain.

SCOTT: There’s an interesting story about Recovery! A lady gave Recovery to her horse, her horse was asthmatic and arthritic, and he showed dramatic improvements in three weeks, his asthma is now virtually gone. And the lady said she’s seen less mobility in 10-years-old horses than she sees in this 27-years old Arab. I thought that was just a great testimony!

MARTIN: This is an interesting sidebar, the product was originally designed for veterinarian use on large animals, specifically athletic horses, people spend a phenomenal amount of money on these horses, so of course, when you can extend the racing career of a horse, that’s a fantastic thing. Then they started using it for smaller animals. If you have a dog that will not jump into the back of your pickup truck anymore, or will not jump up on the sofa anymore, or doesn’t want to run anymore, that’s because he’s hurting. So when you feed him Recovery, all of a sudden this pain goes away. So they then re-designed it for human use!

SCOTT: This guy, Declan, gave us a really good testimonial. He said: “I’m 33 years old. I’m diagnosed with a degenerative disc in my lower back 12 months ago, after dealing with years of chronic back pain and many days in bed. I had tried numerous prescriptions and anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxants, and painkillers in the past, and nothing seemed to work. Then I tried Recovery. I am very thankful that I found out about Recovery and I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know.” So it’s something your dog needs, your horse needs, and you need!

MARTIN: What’s interesting at that physiological level is that the muscles, tendons, and cartilage in all mammals are nearly identical. I don’t know the exact number, but we’re 95% identical at that level to the horse or the dog.

SCOTT: So Martin, if somebody wanted to know more about Recovery and the Amino acids, where could they go and find out?

MARTIN: Visit www.life-enthusiasts.com, go to ‘health concerns’ and look up ‘trauma and injury,’ you will find it. Or search for “Recovery” or “Platinum Plus Amino Acids” in the search bar at the top of the website, the little magnifying glass icon. And if you need some personalized help, some hand-holding through the process, call me! My number is (866) 543 3388, I am here ready to answer your questions. This week several people called in and said: “I’m really enjoying these podcasts, you are helping me immensely, please do not stop.” I do like to hear that of course. Some of the questions that people have had are being answered in these podcasts, and then when they follow the advice given, they actually get better.

SCOTT: What a concept, huh?

MARTIN: Functional medicine and its principles are not understood by mainstream science. The reductionist scientific model, the reductionist mindset that causes people to think that they need to find a single cause to a problem, and use a single drug, or understand a single physiological process to reverse it. But in a human body, it doesn’t work like that. The human body is very much like a game of football, let’s just say that you’re looking for the cause, you could say: “well, the quarterback didn’t throw the ball correctly,” but it’s not that simple. There are many other players involved. There is a receiver on the far end, and there is the blocker in between. And then there is the opposing team. You need to have all these different specialists with all these names, like receiver or linebacker or whatever, the kick returner, and the punter, but it doesn’t stop there. You need to have someone who’s going to maintain the grounds, somebody who’s going to wash the uniforms, and somebody is going to give your guys the physio, and then there is the other side, the business side, somebody is going to collect the money for the tickets and so on.

So when you see the game of football in the context, you understand that pointing at the quarterback as ‘he won the game’ is one of the silliest reductionist types of examples. The whole team has to have credit. And similarly with the human body, if you have a carpal tunnel problem, you will find out that yes, the repetitive movements are probably the most immediate cause of it, but there is the physiological issue, there are the toxicity levels, some nutritional issues, deficiencies. Most people in America will resent me for saying this because they want a push-button solution to everything. We have been seduced and duped by the advertisers to think that things can be solved by a single push of a button, or by a pill. Well, we have pills that help, but it’s not going to be one pill, and it’s not going to be a silver bullet. And until you accept the fact that this is actually complex rather than simple, you’re destined to be in trouble.

SCOTT: It’s really important as well that you do your homework. Oftentimes we listen to these podcasts, or we go to our doctors and everything else, and we take everything as gospel, and there’s tons of research backing up everything that we say. In fact, we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of articles on the Life Enthusiast website that give you a pretty good snapshot of the whole picture in terms of any issue that you may want to concern yourself with or deal with, and we also have lots of scientific studies and information that backs up what we say. Obviously, we can’t cite all the different studies here on the podcast, that would be a pretty lengthy podcast, but you can go to www.life-enthusiast.com and you check out the articles, and you check out the information, you will find tons and tons of references to studies that back up the things that we say

MARTIN: Indeed. So that’s why we say that we are restoring vitality to you and to the planet!

SCOTT: Thanks for joining us, everybody! See you next time!

Author: Martin Pytela