<Fallacies of Orthopedic Surgery, Part 6>
■ Dehydration within muscle tissue
More than a decade ago, I began incorporating Medical Dynamic Stretching (hereinafter referred to as MDS) into my treatments, even though I was half-skeptical myself. However, not all cases yielded positive results. While there were instances where symptoms were dramatically alleviated, there were also cases where the expected results were not achieved, or even worse, the symptoms were exacerbated. I did not fully understand what caused this inconsistency. However, after examining an acquaintance's lower back pain, I realized that for muscle relaxation failure to be resolved, it is a prerequisite that sufficient water is secured within the muscle tissue. I knew that this acquaintance, for whom MDS was ineffective, was an unparalleled coffee lover and lived a life with very little water intake.
■ Chronic dehydration
Usually, in medicine, only acute dehydration is considered a problem. This is because it is dehydration within the blood vessels, which affects the circulating plasma volume and is life-threatening. However, the issue here is chronic dehydration. It was thought that not only the amount of water intake, but also the habitual excessive intake of beverages with strong diuretic effects and chronic dehydration within muscle tissue caused by the side effects of regularly taken medications, induce muscle relaxation failure and become factors leading to intractability. As a result of interviews, cases where MDS was not very effective were biased toward patients who exhibited a state of chronic dehydration, having a habit of drinking a lot of caffeine despite low water intake. Therefore, when I encouraged patients to change their drinking habits, corrected chronic dehydration over several days, and performed MDS on the key muscles that had recovered from dehydration, results began to be obtained at a high rate.
■ Benefits of water intake
What is noteworthy is that dehydration within muscle tissue, which reflects chronic dehydration, takes longer to correct compared to dehydration within blood vessels, which reflects acute dehydration, and there was a time lag in recovery depending on age. Depending on compliance, it took about one week for a 40-year-old and about two weeks for a 70-year-old. Also, by having patients change their water intake habits, improvements in diseases in other departments, such as headaches, dementia, constipation, and cystitis, were also observed. On the other hand, patients with problems in the cardiovascular system, including hypertension, were difficult to treat. This is because even a slight excess in water intake could become a source of harm to their health.
■ Diagnosis of dehydration within muscle tissue
Incidentally, the diagnosis of chronic dehydration was performed through interviews and palpation, based on a water intake of 30ml per 1kg of body weight. For patients in environments with high perspiration or nursing mothers, I considered the required amount to be higher, and in palpation, I checked for the presence of tenderness or stiffness in the first intercostal space. This is because in a state of chronic dehydration, tenderness or hardening is observed in that area. Caffeine such as coffee, black tea, and green tea, as well as rooibos tea, have strong diuretic effects like alcohol, and I calculated them as a minus against the water intake amount.
■ The disease called fibromyalgia
Interestingly, all patients with significant chronic dehydration also met the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia and exhibited various complaints, including vague back pain. However, as long as those complaints were in the early stages of the disease, they were easily alleviated just by changing water intake habits and waiting a few days. What this means is that the intractable disease feared as fibromyalgia may actually be cerebrospinal fluid hypovolemia and systemic muscle relaxation failure caused by chronic dehydration. However, in cases where the duration of the disease was prolonged and psychosomatic medicine drugs were prescribed, it appeared that even if the dehydration was improved, the cerebrum could no longer recognize that change.
■ What are the qualities of an athlete?
In addition to this, there were cases where MDS worked dramatically even in patients with severe chronic dehydration, regardless of age. Such patients usually had intensive experience as athletes, such as participating in the National Sports Festival or the Inter-High School Championships, but on the other hand, a similar phenomenon was observed in a small number of patients who had no continuous exercise experience at all. This is thought to be a reflection of a high ability to control muscle contraction and relaxation, and it may represent potential qualities as an excellent athlete.
#CreativeAward2026 #AllCategoryDivision