the CRAIG VAN cast
Hey, I’m Craig. I've dedicated more than a decade to understanding the human spine. Now I’m sharing what I’ve learnt. Get started with my SPINE STRENGTH project - Part 1 is free. Subscribe and you’ll receive my work as I release it.
the CRAIG VAN cast
57 | Don’t trust, verify! A critical thinker’s guide to validate HEALTH advice
Can you discern the life-changing health habits amidst the avalanche of wellness trends? Let's embark on a quest together, as we navigate the sea of information and pinpoint the choices that genuinely foster healing. This episode strips away the buzzwords and fluff, grounding you in the scientific principles that stand as reliable beacons in the chaos. With special insights from the Kinetic Keystone project, we'll provide you with a blueprint to carve out your very own health roadmap, tailored to meet the nuances of your personal journey. Prepare to arm yourself with strategies that are both scientifically sound and intimately personalized.
When back pain strikes with a vengeance, where do you turn for relief? Enter Professor Stuart McGill, the spine whisperer, who joins us to unravel the art of back pain recovery with precision and empathy. Discover how to listen to your body's subtle cues, transforming pain into a dialogue that guides your healing. This episode isn't just about recovery; it's a tribute to the human body—a masterpiece of nature's engineering. Join us for an exploration into the remarkable capabilities of our bodies, and learn how to cultivate a relationship of deep respect and awe with the vessel that carries us through life.
@craigvandotcom (on all channels)
Website: https://craigvan.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/craigvandotcom
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/craigvandotcom/?hl=en
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHJ9dnY6Vj7BVNNCMQ72hbQ
in a world full of disagreements and constantly changing trends in human health, I'm going to tell you how I find the signal in all the noise. Even though popular ideas keep getting replaced by newer and shinier ideas, I have found a way to figure out which information supports my healing, and I'm going to share it with you, because I have found a way to know what is true versus what is trendy, a way to know with certainty which habits and choices heal me and which cause me more harm. Thing is, even though most of the information available to us these days is useless, distracting and potentially damaging to us, we must still search to find the best information possible, because it can shoot our progress light years into the future. We must stand on the shoulders of giants, because this is one of the biggest benefits of being human we can learn from one another, but we need a method to know what information we should use and what we should throw away. Think of yourself as drowning in a waterfall of information and possibility. You need to know, or at least you need to figure out, how to filter out all the information that will harm your recovery and keep only what will help you For us to trust and then apply any information, we must first maximise our confidence in its effectiveness.
Speaker 1:We don't want to believe that it is good information. We want to know that it is good information, or at least as best as we can. The question is how. Before we try on any information for ourselves, we want to know how reliable it is. There is a very well known, almost religious approach to this kind of validation of information. It is the scientific method. We should only give some of our trust to information that has solid evidence from experiments that other people have run before us. Before we run the experiment on ourselves, we must be as confident as we can that it will produce the same results again for us. Therefore, we want our information filter to remove the information with little to no evidence that it can cause the change we are looking for. But we must still remember no matter how strong any evidence is from an experiment that someone else has run, it will never guarantee that our unique body and mind will respond in the same way. So using evidence from other people's experiences has its limitations, but it can still be very useful as a starting point if we don't forget our individuality.
Speaker 1:The second function or feature we need from our information filter is to prioritize information which is more relevant over information which is less relevant to our situation, to our unique situation. I've just explained that information that has strong evidence is extremely valuable, but we must also know that all evidence loses its value as we gather it from situations farther and farther removed from our own situation. So the most valuable information is that information which relates most closely to our unique situation and with proven results. A good question to ask, then, is are there people trying to solve the same problem as I am, who are in a similar situation to me? It is at this confluence or overlap of these two sources of information the reliable and relevant that we start to build a map for our own mission, our very own experiment. We want information which is reliable and relevant, information which has strong evidence and which is most suitable for our situation. However, this is Only an ideal starting point. Sometimes we can only find information which passes one of these tests, and sometimes we can't even tell which factors in our situation are important when we compare our situation to another. All we can do is try our best to find the most trustworthy information we can, and often we may be wrong and we'll need to try again. We need to stand on the shoulders of giants, but figuring out which giant is a pivotal part of the journey, maybe the most important part. The high quality information that forms the backbone of the Kinetic Keystone project has and continues to produce powerful results. I believe it's because it passes these two tests with flying colours. It is reliable and relevant.
Speaker 1:In my early years as a clinician, I was looking for information that could guide my back pain patients safely and reliably to recovery. I felt forced to find information with evidence-based results because I was working in a clinical setting responsible for the recovery of some very delicate spines. I needed reliable information, and the information I needed had to be relevant to the very careful and often frustrating early stages of back injury recovery, quite simply because nothing else would work. Without considering exactly where my patients were in their journey, our exercises would exceed their level of readiness and flare their pain up again. I needed information which was designed and proven in the early stages of severe back pain recovery, not just general spine strength. I knew I wanted to help redevelop and strengthen my patients' spines, and there are many methods out there to achieve spine strength. A few of them even have solid evidence to back them up, but luckily those programs are used by long-term power lifters or professional weight lifters, gym nests, strong men, etc. But that was not specific enough. Valid but not specific. I kept searching and started looking in the therapeutic and rehabilitation circles and to this day I have only found one rigorously tested method that has hundreds, if not thousands, of successful cases of reliably and predictably helping people recover from severe back pain and not just returning to pain-free. But it has taken people with severe back injuries far beyond normal recovery Back to world-class, elite level performances in some cases as far as back pain and spine strength go. My journey to find, study and implement the work of Professor Stuart McGill with my patients proved to be extremely valuable, and I understand it to achieve this because it meets these two requirements completely. The back pain recovery method of Professor Stuart McGill is both extremely effective, as shown by loads of evidence, and it is also perfectly relevant, designed to be implemented specifically by people with back pain. The results speak for themselves.
Speaker 1:However, Even having the most effective and relevant information known to man is not enough. We are each that unique and our uniqueness is constantly changing. We must apply the best knowledge we can get our hands on, to get a head start and some direction, but then, inch by inch, we must observe how it impacts us, how effective it is and whether it is actually working for us. We use our observation and analysis of the continuous feedback to steer our direction and to control the pace of our progress. We are then continuously assessing the effectiveness of and customising the applied knowledge precisely to our individual needs. We should never blindly trust that any information will change us in the same way that it changed someone else. We must always critically observe how we respond and be very cautious when applying new information, any new information.
Speaker 1:We need a practice of self-reflection that can validate the truth of the impact of our behaviours on our back pain Not predicted, not believed, not trusted results, but the actual and real results that we rarely experience. This is the highest form of information In the moment that we directly observe how we change. After any action, we step out of the realm of trust and into truth as it pertains to our individual reality. This practice of honest and rigorous self-reflection lies at the heart of Professor Stuart McGill's protocol. He advises that we observe the pain very closely, noticing when it changes and how it changes. We must learn which specific movements and activities cause our pain, because we need to change them.
Speaker 1:Back pain is arguably the trickiest and most challenging injury to rehabilitate, and medical scientists have even labelled most back pain as idiopathic or of unknown or nonspecific origin. Then, in an ocean of unreliable treatments, a method which has proven to reliably guide people out of this most tricky situation is built on and guided by the information coming from our body. Only by observing how our body responds every day can we directly assess whether what we are doing is actually working, and we can refine what we are doing when necessary. Our direct, subjective experience of our back pain is the most important information revealing the state of our back's recovery and the effectiveness of what we are doing. If our recovery is good, then our pain will improve, and vice versa. Of course, at the start we need to boost our back and pain intelligence, because we have never been given the tools to understand and respond to the signals of our body. So this is a big learning curve in itself, but it might be the most important lesson.
Speaker 1:Once we learn how to be guided by the signals of our body, it starts to feel like it is talking to us, guiding us Speaking a language which we can learn to understand, a language that exists, perhaps to tell us where to go. Vin, if injuries show up because we have imbalance, excess or disharmony in our behaviors and habits, then these challenges could be thought of as lessons here to guide us back to harmony and balance. If we start to view our injuries as lessons and our pain as a teacher or a guide, it starts to feel like we have a very intelligent body and mind which can and wants to guide us in a way that feels very intuitive. We get lessons when we need them and our body can teach us what to do. We seem to have forgotten the purpose of the lessons and how to listen to our bodies.
Speaker 1:In my experience, this is what I'm actually trying to say. In my experience, and the experience of the healthiest people I know intelligence is not enough. Information is not enough. We need to develop our bodily intuition. The only way we can know if what we're doing is working is by directly observing how we are impacted by our choices and behaviors. We need to find the best information we can possibly find and then observe very closely how it impacts us and when we implement it. We need to observe how it impacts us when we implement it. Blind trust and belief just won't get us there, unless we are extremely lucky, and we shouldn't count on that. We need to pay attention and verify for ourselves. In this way, we can move from trendy to trustworthy, to truth.
Speaker 1:In conclusion, I think that it's insane that we've stopped paying attention to ourselves. It's even more insane that we've forgotten that nothing affects our health more than what we do, what we eat, how we move and the way we think. There is no cream pill, therapy or surgery that can change our destiny. Only we can do it through our actions, and only we can know which actions we need by observing the truth of how they impact us. That's it. There's no other way. There's no way out of that.
Speaker 1:What saddens me the most, though, is that we've become convinced that our body is blind and stupid. So blind that it breaks unnecessarily. So stupid that it complains without reason, when, in fact, the vessel we have been gifted with for this lifetime is a miracle of intelligence. It only breaks when we abuse it or don't use it properly. It only complains because it has something to say, something we need to hear. It doesn't break because it's unreliable. It doesn't complain because it's simple. This journey of pain close attention to and listening, using the information from my body has left me in awe of the miracle that is my body and its mind. I hope to share some of that magical experience with you. Thank you for listening.