I first saw this Louis C.K. clip a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. (Be sure you watch until the 3:05 mark, which is where he really starts to make his point).
Studying anatomy and physiology and learning about the body has helped me to get to the point where I can start to appreciate just how crazy/complicated/complex our experience as human beings is.
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A lot of people seem to become intimidated when I talk about taking these classes, and say things like, “Yeah, but I’m not any good at science.”
It makes me really sad to hear people say that, because honestly—there was a time when I didn’t think I would be any good at science, either.
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I did pretty badly in science classes in high school because, well, my life was falling apart. I just couldn’t get it together enough to study enough, and when I did, nothing could really become cemented because I hadn’t really slept.
I did much better in the humanities classes, because it was easier to just wing it. I might have been to out of it to memorize chemical structures, but it wasn’t too hard to just read a novel and give my opinion.
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Then after high school: for years, in the back of my mind, I sometimes thought about becoming a physical therapist.
Originally, the idea was born more out of desperation than inspiration. I was so frustrated by the fact that there was always something hurting, all the time, and that I seemed to have a new physical therapy referral every few months. I was always really interested in the explanations the physical therapists gave me, and always did all my exercises, but it didn’t seem to be quite enough. I sometimes wondered if the only way out of this would be to take matters into my own hands, rather than relying on other people for the rest of my life.
Then I met Tim and watched Neil Pearson’s lectures, and all of a sudden my desperation turned to inspiration. There actually was a reason why I was hurting all the time—an overarching reason that I could work on, rather than targeting different parts my body, piecemeal, for the next several decades. And maybe I could help other people like me, like Tim had helped me.
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This is the point at which I actually started to look into what it would take to get into physical therapy school, and saw that I’d have to take all of the science classes I’d so carefully avoided in college.
Now I am grateful that I had to go back and take all of these classes. And I mean, we’re not really talking high level stuff here—we’re talking general chemistry, introduction to physics. The things you would take in your freshman or sophomore year of college.
Basic as they are, these classes have totally changed the way I look at things.
It’s like recognizing there are two sides to every coin. On one side, I can focus on my experience—the way a certain part of my body feels (or, in most cases, hurts).
If I want to flip to the other side of the coin, I can stop and think about the complex forces that are literally holding this part of my body together. The intricate chemical and electrical signals that sensations to travel from my the rest of my body to my brain, and then back again. And the different areas of my brain that are involved in letting me feel the pain, and determining how much of my attention is devoted to the pain, versus paying attention to other things.
And the thing is—you really don’t need to be an expert, at all, to develop this sense of appreciation. I mean honestly, I know nothing. If I wanted to go into more detail than what I just wrote above, well, I’d have to go open a textbook to make sure I didn’t tell you the wrong thing.
It’s not about mastering this information; it’s just about having been exposed to it, and having a sense of just how complex these things are. Complex, yet also orderly. Yes, we live in a chaotic universe, but our bodies have a blueprint that can be broken down into categories and understood.
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Sometimes I daydream about running a class for chronic pain patients. Not an academic class—more like a continuing ed class.
And we would just go over the very basics from anatomy and physiology. And my students could see that, when you just begin to learn about the body, it’s actually more like a language class than a science class.
Just as you would make a chart of the different parts of speech (past, present, future, etc.) you can make a chart of the major systems of the body. And then you can look at each system and break it down further; for example, you can break the skeletal system down into different types of bones, and then look at individual bones.
And then, as teacher, I would focus on the bones of the spine, since the spine is such a grave, sometimes threatening concept for anyone with back pain. I would explain that even though it looks like some kind of alien invention when you look at a diagram, the spine can actually be simple:
There are four parts of the spine. From top to bottom:
Cervical spine= 7 vertebrae that make up your neck
Thoracic spine= 12 vertebrae in upper- and mid-back
Lumbar spine= 5 vertebrae in lower back
Sacrum= fused vertebrae at the bottom of the spine, which make up the center of the pelvis
These terms are things that back pain patients hear all the time, and may even have explained to them. But, in my experience, there’s a big difference between having a doctor mention these things to you in passing—in an appointment where you’re scared of what he or she might diagnose you with—and learning something in a calm academic setting.
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The spine is just one example– there are so many different aspects of our physical being that sound complicated, even scary, when explained by a doctor, but look simple– and interesting– when broken down into smaller categories.
It’s helped me immeasurably to begin to understand this. Having a “second side of the coin” to flip to means it’s easier for me to change my perspective on the physical realities I sometimes can’t change.
Now I can’t think about how much something hurts without thinking about the fantastic nature of how it hurts. The fact that I have a bone, with muscles attached to it, with nerves that let those muscles communicate with this fantastic brain I have—it’s all pretty incredible.
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