Advancing Your Health

Emory’s David Pasion, MPT, physical therapist at the Emory Orthopaedics and Spine Center was recently interviewed by the team at CNN in response to a recent article in the New York Times titled, “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body.” As Pasion put is, "Reading that article, if somebody wasn't familiar with yoga or let's say they were planning on doing yoga, if they read that article, they'd say, let me find something else to do. And so, in that aspect, no, I don't think it was fair. There was too many negatives thrown out." While David Pasion agrees that it is possible to sustain injuries while practicing yoga, he also believes the article was “alarmist” and lacked context to present a fair assessment of the health benefits and risks of practicing [...]

For years, triathlete Denise Novicki suffered from excruciating spinal pain in her lower back. Founder of Tri2Remember, a triathlon club that raises money to fight Alzheimer’s disease, Denise had always led an active lifestyle, but her back pain made it difficult, if not impossible, to enjoy her favorite pastime. “I was in such immense pain that I was looking for some very trusted resources to manage my pain,” Denise says. She chose the Emory Spine Center at the Emory University Orthopaedics & Spine Hospital for assessment and a solution. “What we’ve tried to do here at the Emory Spine Center is take the worry and the guessing out of a spine or back problem," says Dr. Scott Boden (pictured left), director of the Center. “When people come here, we help them figure out what’s wrong and give them lots of different options.” Before [...]

Because our sports medicine specialists have created a new program dedicated entirely to ACL injuries and your successful recovery from them, we’ve been sharing blog posts that correspond with the stages of the program. In first post, we helped you identify goals and prepare for ACL surgery after an injury and also introduced you to the concept of prehabilitation, which is equally as important as rehabilitating after surgery. For more on that topic, check out part I of our ACL injury blog series. After helping you prepare for surgery, we then moved on to identifying your post-ACL surgery recovery goals week-by-week in part II of [...]

Dr. Amadeus Mason of Emory Sports Medicine explains biomechanical injuries and how they can be prevented and treated. In sports medicine, we see a lot of biomechanical injuries. A biomechanical injury is caused by the overuse or incorrect use of a joint or muscle. This type of injury generally occurs when the joint has been stressed in the wrong way or overstressed repetitively over a short period of time. While any joint can sustain a biomechanical injury, at the Emory Sports Medicine Center, I see a lot of runners who come in complaining of knee pain. Iliotibial band syndrome, or ITBS, is a biomechanical injury. It usually presents as pain on the outer side of the knee and is a common complaint among middle-distance runners or [...]

I myself have heard friends make unsupported claims that working out on an empty stomach is more effective, or that people should wait a certain amount of time after exercising to eat. Because I’ve been wondering whether it’s better to eat before or after I exercise, and more specifically, which foods I should be eating to support a physically active lifestyle, I reached out to our own Dr. Amadeus Mason to get answers to my questions.  My first question for Dr. Mason was:  Do you recommend eating before or after a workout? Does your recommendation change whether the workout type is cardio-based or strength training? Dr. Mason’s answer was extremely helpful, “Eating after exercise is pretty much the standard recommendation now. But what you’re eating is actually more important than [...]

It is estimated that there are approximately 80,000 anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tears in the U.S. each year. Not surprisingly, 70% of those injuries take place while the person injured is participating in athletic activity. Because ACL tears are so common and can put a hindrance on an athlete pursuing his or her career or passion, our Emory Sports Medicine team has put together an ACL program specifically for people seeking guidance in their treatment and recovery from ACL injuries and tears. In our last blog post on ACL injuries, we got you familiar with the idea of prehabilitation, or care and steps to take before surgery for an ACL-tear. which is part one of the ACL program at Emory. [...]

In September, we shared with you some resources on the health benefits of practicing yoga, in honor of Yoga Awareness Month. Make sure to check that resource out, as a new study has recently found that participating in weekly yoga classes is equally as effective as regular deep stretching in relieving symptoms of low back pain. The study, from which findings were published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, followed over 200 people for up to 26 weeks, making it the largest study focusing on yoga’s effect on low back pain. Of the 228 followed, subjects participated in weekly classes in which they practiced either yoga or deep stretching and also practiced the same thing at home, with the help [...]

Did you know? "Prehabilitation” is just as important as rehabilitation after an ACL tear? If you’re an athlete, you’re at a greater risk for knee injury than someone who doesn’t participate regularly in a sport. One of the most common sports injuries, the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear, can happen suddenly. Twist your knee sharply or extend it beyond its normal range during play, and you may hear the telltale “pop.” While many sports injuries can be treated non-surgically, some, like an ACL tear, may benefit from surgery. The sports medicine physicians, physical therapists, and certified athletic trainers at the Emory Sports Medicine Center have designed the ACL Rehabilitation Program to help you prepare for ACL surgery, enjoy a successful post-op recovery, [...]

She’s only 16, but she’s already been playing soccer for over a decade. In that time, Alex Anne Matthews, a junior at the Lovett School in the Buckhead area of Atlanta, has broken several bones and sustained two concussions. Unfortunately, according to a new study, the injuries Alex has sustained over her currently 12-year-long soccer career are not only common, but more common for female high school soccer players than males. During a soccer game on September 4th of this year, Alex hit the ground with force. “She came up from behind me and slide-tackled my feet out from under me, and I landed on my side, and the first thing to hit the ground was my head,” she recalls. Alex’s parents looked on as it happened, and as her mother, Anne Matthews puts [...]

If you’re starting to feel the twinges of pain or stiffness in your joints or spine, you may be wondering what’s causing it and whether you can prevent it from getting worse. One common contributor to joint and spine pain is osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis is a common joint disease that is caused by degeneration of the cartilage, the cushiony substance between the bones, and if severe, it can then affect the bone itself. Osteoarthritis most commonly affects the weight-bearing joints (hips, knees, and spine). The chance of developing arthritis increases with age. Although some people may have it as early as their 20s and 30s, it is more likely to develop osteoarthritis in your 50 and 60s and older. There is no cure for osteoarthritis, so prevention is the key. There are some risk factors that you can’t change, such as [...]