Foundations of Health

Harnessing the Restorative Power of Movement, Heat, Breath, and the Endocannabinoid System to Heal Pain and Actively Adapt for a Healthy Life

Eric Goodman

• Editorial: Harper
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780062996107
• Categoría: Medicina
• Categoría: Medicina alternativa y complementaria

The Founder of the proven Foundation Training program takes his teaching to the next phase, showing us how to utilize our body's built-in systems for healing and introducing a new program that offers a perpetual inner core of wellness and adaptability.

Dr. Eric Goodman's innovative approach to self-healing—Foundation Training—has helped athletes, first responders, celebrities, and regular folks around the world. The heart of Foundation Training is a unique form of biomechanics—a series of postures, poses, and movements designed to teach the body's individual muscles to act within strong, flexible chains, shifting the burden of support away from sensitive joints.

Foundations of Health builds on this core program, going deep into its principles to help us understand how to maintain a healthy body, even when the mechanics eventually break down. Our bodies are built to heal themselves—without surgeries and prescriptive medications. The protocols expand on the original Foundation Training concepts, focusing on the endogenous cannabinoid stimulators—part of an extraordinary built-in endocannabinoid system that profoundly affects our central, enteric, and peripheral nervous systems and helps to regulate numerous responses in our body.

Dr. Goodman explains the science behind the endogenous cannabinoid system and how it can be stimulated in natural and healthy ways, including heat, breath work, and movement—techniques that will help guide and maintain the state of balance the body needs to function optimally with stability and harmony. He recommends foods, herbs, and supplements likely to ease pain, lower stress, and boost mental and physical function. He addresses the notable medicinal benefits of CBD, THC, and the many terpenes associated with cannabis's reputation for healing, and teaches how to be a smart consumer of cannabinoids.

Foundations of Health provides a unique understanding and approach to healing that will forever change the way we think of our bodies and our physical health.

Chapter 1

Pain and Healing: A New Understanding

WHAT IS PAIN?

The body is a vastly complex ecosystem, an environment of linked systems that interact symbiotically and synergistically. Each of our body’s main processes, from digestion to circulation and respiration, work in concert to keep the whole body functioning, balanced, and healthy. Our blood carries digested nutrients and oxygen from the lungs to cells across the body, including in our bones, which in turn create new blood cells. Our musculoskeletal system creates a protective cage around organs like the liver and kidneys, which rid the body of waste produced by (among others) bone cells. Muscular contractions in the digestive tract and movement in the skeletal system create healthy digestive, lymphatic, and immune systems. Healthy breathing improves muscular flexibility, circulation, and lymphatic drainage, which improves our immunity. All of our parts work together to create a thriving whole.

Seeing those intersystemic connections involves holding a lot of complex ideas together at once, and that is no small task. Nowhere is this challenge clearer than in the way we understand pain. Our conventional medical approach most often looks at pain as something local, something that exists only at the place that hurts the most. For example, if your wrist hurts, your wrist is the problem. If you have a headache, then you must have a problem in your head. Back pain means you have something wrong with your spine. So we treat the immediate location of the pain instead of its source. This really doesn’t work.

Our understanding of pain is best comprehended—and treated—when we consider it in the context of the whole body. Seen this way, the real answers are more complex: that wrist pain might be the result of stimulated nerves in the spine or neck. That headache might be the result of untreated scalene (neck) inflammation, perhaps even digestive dysfunction or a chronically clenched jaw. That back problem might be the result of a hip or knee injury causing you to overcompensate and put too much pressure on the lower back. From this point on, I want you to understand that pain constitutes information and we are going to learn how to harness that information toward healing.

The big picture here is that chronic pain is often not a localized issue at all. It is a failure in the ecosystem, a breakdown somewhere in the relationships between the body’s various systems. The symbiosis and synergy that should be happening is interrupted, and that failure ripples out well beyond its point of origin. Pain may result from a purely mechanical or neurological breakdown, but it could just as easily be a block in the communication between two systems.

Consider headaches again, for instance. Of course, some are caused by a musculoskeletal response, from sleeping wrong or whiplash. But many headaches are a digestive and lymphatic issue: there’s something in our guts that shouldn’t be there, and the body is responding with inflammation during its attempts to purge.

I have come to define pain as some kind of interruption of flow, and that flow can involve any tissue in the body. Pain can manifest itself in so many ways that if you’re just reacting to the symptom—the sore knee, the frozen shoulder—you aren’t listening to what your body is trying to tell you. This is of course frustrating, because we all want a definitive diagnosis, and in some ways, it’s much easier to think about just fixing your elbow or addressing the pain in your neck. While some exercises will help alleviate these issues, I have found that the better, more long-lasting fix seems to lie in improving the intersystem relationships within the body. When these systems learn to communicate more effectively and efficiently, the body no longer needs to send out a distress signal, and pain vanishes.

Here’s another example from my own life. Since middle school I’ve had digestive issues that would come and go, a low-grade irritable bowel syndrome that flared up occasionally, causing discomfort. This never got so bad that it had a huge impact on my physical health, but it absolutely affected my state of mind. Despite constantly chasing the perfect diet, I couldn’t digest food easily, and I was often tired. This became more of an issue for me in graduate school, when I was under stress and sitting in class eight hours a day. If you remember, it’s also when the pain in my back had reached a crisis point. I knew from the X-rays that my lower back—my L4, L5, and S1—was my worst injury. That’s right where your spine meets the sacrum, which then connects to the pelvis.

You know what’s right in front of that? The sigmoid region of the large intestine, the same digestive tissue that had been mildly irritating me for over a decade. One of the biggest changes that I noticed with Foundation Training over the years was a radical improvement in my digestion. At the time, I was focused on my spine injury, trying to create space around and strength in the damaged bones and tissue. But it turns out that creating that space had an enormous impact on my digestive health. The improvement in my digestion was directly correlated with more energy and creativity and a greater sense of well-being. Every single one of those things improved as my back, and then my digestion and elimination, became healthier.

If I had gone to a doctor for my low-grade bowel issue, they would have examined my diet, looked for any blockages or physical issues, and most likely ended up prescribing an antacid or NSAID to help with inflammation. Few practitioners would have correlated digestive health with back pain, and even I didn’t make the connection at the time. But now that’s how I view every symptom I am presented with in my own body, as well in those of my patients. Every focal point of pain tells a larger story, and as our first patient found out, if we aren’t listening to that larger story, we have no chance of adequately addressing the pain.

AVOIDING THE TRADITIONAL PATH

Sixty-four-year-old Patti Sheaff is a passionate lifelong surfer who for the past ten years has been evolving away from a “call the doctor/treat the injury” approach to her pain. But it’s important to remember where she started.

Patti Sheaff, Surfer

I took a fall snowboarding in 2010 and shattered my sacrum. That was the turning point, the start of probably four years—maybe more—of a lot of agony, a lot of trying to figure out how to get strong. Just dealing with the pain was my main objective at that point. I was athletic—still surfing—but just in so much pain I couldn’t pick my surfboard up off the ground.

I worked for UCLA for a good part of my life, so I had decent health insurance. I had epidurals, a little microsurgery, and then I found RFAs, which are radiofrequency ablation, a procedure where they go in and burn all the nerves on your spine. I had maybe nine epidurals throughout those four years, and two or three RFAs, and the microsurgery. Some of them helped with the pain, but I was also on Percocet for about three or four years. It meant I could surf and play, but then six months later, the pain would come back—that’s how it works.

On top of that, I’ve got pretty major scoliosis, and lots of back pain because of it. To tell you the truth, it was never really addressed. An orthopedic guy tried to give me orthotics, but you know, I don’t wear shoes, so that didn’t work. I even tried to glue flip-flops together, and it was just ridiculous. Chiropractic care worked for me for a long time. Until it didn’t. It was an overnight thing, he just stopped being able to get any movement out of my lower spine.

Patti’s lifestyle may be out of the ordinary, but her experience of pain is in fact quite normal. You may have never stepped on a surfboard or gone snowboarding (let alone skydiving, Patti’s other passion), but the truth is, you have most likely been in pain or will be at some point. Eighty percent of people in the United States alone will experience back pain at some point in their lives. That’s not to speak of the many other pain points and issues. I say this not to scare you, only to point out that chronic pain is a true epidemic in this country, and the way it’s traditionally been addressed is only making things worse.

I have heard a variation of Patti’s story from almost every patient I’ve seen over the past several years. There is an injury or constant discomfort, followed by X-rays and MRIs, an official diagnosis that sounds terrifying, physical therapy, and often surgery. Almost without exception, this is the path we set down when we wake up with back pain, or when hours spent on the computer have resulted in carpal tunnel syndrome or looking down at our phones constantly has caused neck strain.

The first warning sign you get that your body is out of alignment is usually back pain. Whether it’s fallout from a strenuous session at the gym or just weeks of vague tightness and discomfort, your body is trying to tell you that something is wrong. You go to your doctors, and they run some tests. More often than not, they are going to find something—a bulging disc, a herniation, disc degeneration, arthritis. Now they have something to focus on, something to treat. As we saw with Patti, physical therapy, pain pills, and operations soon follow.

The major mistake here is that from the outset, the focus becomes too narrow. Along with a disconnected/segmented approach to pain comes a “quick fix” mentality for solving it. Just like we might head to the drive-through when we’re hungry, we take Advil for a headache, get an epidural for back pain, or endure surgery for a herniated disk. If we just surgically repair that knee or shoulder or hip, we think, we’ll be as good as new in a few months. The quicker we can get out of pain, the better.

The problem is that quick localized fixes often don’t work, particularly over a long period of time. Steroid injections might ease chronic lower back pain temporarily, but as Patti will sadly remind you, the effects wear off after just a few months, and then you’re back to where you started, ready to try something else. Spinal surgeries, the number of which increased 70 percent from 2001 to 2011 and continue to rise exponentially, are hugely popular, but clinical studies show most actually do not result in meaningfully better outcomes for patients than nonsurgical treatment. In fact, surgery might make things worse. One study used data from the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation to look at the efficacy of spinal fusion surgery. Two years after the procedure, only 26 percent of patients returned to work and 41 percent were using more painkillers. Meanwhile, 67 percent of patients who did not have surgery had returned to work.

Painkillers themselves are an enormous part of the problem. Though opioids have become a standard prescription for back pain, we are now learning that they are actually ineffective and can even cause more pain, an effect called opioid-induced hyperalgesia. Rather than reducing pain messages to the brain, opioids (usually when taken in higher doses for a longer time) can do the opposite, causing increased pain sensitivity in the nervous system, to both existing and new injuries or conditions. On top of that, the frequency and recklessness with which opioids have been given to patients has caused a major epidemic in this country, claiming nearly 69,710 lives in 2020 alone, up nearly 18,000 from the previous year.

Instead of thinking of the symptom in isolation, as something just to be treated, we have to start thinking about symptoms as a road map. The herniation, the bulging disc, the pain, and repetitive stress injuries that we endure are all pointing to a larger issue: they are often products of poor movement patterns over time.

One of our Foundation Training practitioners, Alli Cost, who is also an occupational therapist, is often helping her patients create that road map, moving them away from siloed thinking. When an avid gardener came into her office complaining of severe carpal tunnel syndrome, the first thing Alli asked was to see what position she gardened in. The patient balked: “You’re not doing anything for my wrist.” So Alli drew a picture to show her how a pinched nerve in the back might be felt in the wrist. “People tend to look at the tree,” she says. “So when I explain that we’re looking at the entire forest, sometimes I need to draw them a little path so they can see how to get through it themselves.”

When you tear the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) or the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) in your knee, your first impulse is to treat the ligament in isolation—with surgery. But when you step back and look at what’s around that ligament, you realize that developing the muscles of the hamstrings, the sartorius (which runs down the length of the thigh), and the adductors (muscles that run along on the body’s inner edges, extending and wrapping from the hip to the back of the femur, just in from where the glutes attach) in the right way can be a far more effective long-term solution to knee stability. Consider the muscles that connect at a point just below the inside knee called the pes anserinus. The tendons of three important support muscles for the knee—the sartorius, the gracilis, and the medial hamstring—all converge here. Without the support of these muscles, the knee is relying only on itself. All this is to say that the stability and health of a joint is a muscular obligation.

Our bodies are very good at sending us warning signs that something isn’t right. These warning signs come in the form of the common complaints that we have—back pain, headaches, hip pain, plantar fasciitis, shin splints. Once we get a warning sign like that, we face a choice. Do we head to the doctor for a quick, temporary fix? Or do we pay attention to the pain more closely, put it in the context of an ecosystem, work harder to feel out the connections for ourselves?

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Understanding pain fully requires more than looking at connections between the systems of the body in a narrowly anatomical way. It’s also about looking at how the body interacts with the mind. While structural issues need to be addressed (we’ll get into that in the next chapter), it’s equally important to examine the mental component to chronic pain as well.

Back in the throes of my increasing back issues, in early 2006, I decided to finish up chiropractic school in California, which unfortunately meant a cross-country drive. I was listening to back-to-back Howard Stern episodes to pass the time when I first heard Dr. John Sarno. Howard himself had been racked with debilitating back pain for years. It got so bad he had to lie down during commercial breaks to try to ease the pressure on his spine. He was, no surprise, scheduled for surgery when someone told him to see Dr. Sarno. Who was this guy that Howard called his personal hero, “the Steve Jobs of pain management” and the person who “saved his life”? It turns out that Sarno’s idea was pretty simple. Pain is mostly in your head.

Sarno developed what he called tension myositis syndrome (TMS) to explain the psychosomatic condition that produces pain—mostly lower back pain, but also neck and shoulder pain, headaches, and even stomach and digestive issues. He determined that in the absence of something objectively, physically wrong, the pain that people felt was a result of repressed psychological or emotional issues. The brain, in an effort not to face the anger or tension or fear you are really feeling, manufactures pain as a way of distracting you from these negative emotions.

This does not mean the pain isn’t real. It’s very real. It just isn’t necessarily caused by a bulging disc or early onset arthritis or whatever diagnosis your doctor may have given you. Instead, it can be caused by the fact that your body responds to the stress of pain by tensing up or breathing shallowly, all of which can create a cascade of secondary pain. Or, as Sarno suggests, pain may simply be created by your nervous system to give you something to focus on.

That’s a pretty radical statement for a medical doctor with degrees from the most prestigious schools. Since the idea flew in the face of conventional medicine, Sarno was mostly ignored or outright mocked by his peers. Yet he helped countless people alleviate their suffering. No wonder Stern called him a hero. Sarno believed that once patients knew this pain was just a symptom—not of a structural issue, but of an emotional issue—they had the power to overcome it. Not only is that a major shift in how to think about pain, but it also empowers patients with their own cure. What a far cry from taking drugs or relenting to surgery.

Sarno’s advice was to tackle the emotional issues that were throwing your life off-balance. He suggests tha...