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Got hit by a car and I’ve concluded doctors are largely a decade or more out of date on a lot of things, especially diet and non-obvious injuries.

I feel like medicine teaches you the facts - the hip bone is connected to the, leg bone - but in terms of 'troubleshooting skills', there is something deeply missing.

It seems like it favours memorizing things and certain patterns.

Humans aren’t great when dealing with complex systems like human bodies.

AI assistants for doctors (who learn to troubleshoot) can’t come soon enough.

> It seems like it favours memorizing things and certain patterns.

I think this is broadly true. Probably not for all of medicine but generally speaking it is.

I recently started having a relapse of debilitating cluster headaches for a couple of weeks for the first time in about a half a decade (maybe longer). I tried avoiding all the typical triggers: Caffeine, chocolate, dust, smoke (difficult in winter when the neighbors love their fires), etc. Nothing worked.

Then I remembered: Ah hah! Sinus infections. I'd forgotten that the underlying trigger for me almost 90% of the time is a sinus infection I didn't notice that got out of hand. About halfway through a course of antibiotics the headaches have largely subsided.

Problem is that my sinus infections never seem to manifest typically, probably due to anatomical abnormalities. This typically means that a week or longer of back-and-forth "we don't see anything wrong" with the doctor worsens the problem until the pressure and pain builds up to a point that touching anywhere near the sinuses is very unpleasant. The best preventative measure I have, and probably the reason I avoided them for so long, is to do regular sinus irrigation. I lapsed about 6 months ago and stopped doing it--whoops.

Most practitioners are fine if you fit the majority of cases and the literature. If you deviate outside that, it's much more difficult to diagnose for the reasons you highlighted regarding complex systems. Humans just suck at it.

I don't have much advice other than to learn and know your own body. You probably know it better than any doctor. But you also need to become your own advocate if you think something isn't quite right and you need some help!

Well, with humans it's a lot harder and ethically challenging to take them apart, insert a few print statements, and put them back together again :)

Physical therapists, however, are pretty darn good at diagnosing muscular problems and excellent at providing problem-specific solutions.

Changing my diet (cutting bread and booze) helped my terrible back and neck more than several years of PT and doctors did.

It’s sort of built into the profession: medical practice is inherently little-c conservative. Doctors are trained throughly to practice the precautionary principle because it’s easier to cause more harm. Often with good reason imagine you’re a surgeon and a new procedure comes out that’s 92% effective and the one you learned in school and have hundreds of hours of practice in is 89% effective. That boost is worth it in theory but are you going to risk a few patients while you learn it along the way? That benefit needs to be much larger in the aggregate. This is also assuming it’s something reach FDA certification, etc. scientific research is often a decade ahead of the market any way in any field.

Then there’s also the reality that doctors at least in the US are incredibly over worked and keeping up with a wide variety of scientific literature is just not practical. This is coupled to an increased specialization in medicine may mean cross-over research from different specialities may not filter into your desk.

> It’s sort of built into the profession: medical practice is inherently little-c conservative. Doctors are trained throughly to practice the precautionary principle because it’s easier to cause more harm. Often with good reason imagine you’re a surgeon and a new procedure comes out that’s 92% effective

I wish they remembered that for COVID vaccines, because apparently it's the exception.

A failed surgery is different to an ineffective vaccination.

Surgeries also aren't commonly deployed against epidemics.

It’s a matter of failure to modernize curriculum during education, and the difficulty of staying on top of new research.

The lag in education needs to be fixed ASAP.

> I suspect part of my problem is shoulder mobility so I also do daily scapular work.

I've had some great results with:

- Kettlebell work. TGU/Halos/Arm bar are all great exercises for shoulder health/strengt/mobility.

- Dead hangs [1].

- Some light stick mobility exercises such as [2].

[1] https://www.t-nation.com/training/tip-two-surprising-exercis...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn1IBowxflw

I was doing deadhangs but I also suffer from elbow pain from a mix of pullups (which I've since not done for a while) and squats. I think deadhangs are great for "decompressing" the spine, though.

I was doing TGU for a while, I should get back into it. Part of it is pandemic-lack-of-space, and part of it is, overhead movements cen trigger the headaches.

How did the squats hurt your elbow? :(

Doing a zillion pullups hurt my elbows. I think a mix of shoulder mobility limits and that caused the pain I get when I squat. This has gone down though despite my squat weight going up. When I squat I try to make more effort to squeeze my shoulders back and down and watch the angle of my arms. Also, holding a kettlebell upside down for 1 minute on each side above my head with elbow straight has greatly reduced my elbow pain.

When I started my yoga asana practice I ended up uncovering some shoulder dyskinesis I hadn’t been aware of from years and years of programming. That turned into a pretty bad shoulder injury that has on the plus side taught me a lot about my body.

One thing I learned is that a lot of shoulder stuff comes from tightness of the pec minor, which now in retrospect is pretty obvious. Some things that I do that have really helped with shoulder stuff:

1) Shoulder dislocates with an aikido jo. Any rigid stick works, like a broom handle.

2) Camel pose (ustrasana), but coming into it a bit differently than is usually taught in yoga classes. Keep your knees hips width distance apart, with your toes tucked under (rather than pointed), and sit on your heels. Grab your heels with your fingers on the inside of your feet (if you were to open your hand your thumbs will be pointing directly backwards). Make sure you have good shoulder rotation here. Now lift your pelvis up while holding on to your feet, get your pelvis stacked over your knees, and think about lifting your chest to the sky. Send your breath into your upper chest for 5-7 breaths and then come out the way you came in. This really opened my pec minor.

3) Gomukhasana with arms clasped behind your back. Use a strap if you can’t get the bind (it might take a while for this rotation to open).

4) Pull-ups. Lots of pull ups. Started with dead hangs, then would do 50% of max 6x times per day 3-4 days a week. Would retest max every 3 weeks. Got myself to about 15 per set before I decided I didn’t need to do that many pull ups.

5) cat cow with wrists flipped, fingers pointed backwards. Really focusing on the shoulder rotation and getting straight arm scapular engagement.

6) Infraspinatus strengthening a few times per week with light weight. Exercises were described in this article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3655748/

7) Lots of side planks (vasisthasana). Be careful with this one, it can do a lot of harm if you go too hard with it before you’re ready.

8) Not for shoulder per-se, but what really strengthened my neck muscles over the years has been practicing headstand the way it’s taught in ashtanga vinyasa yoga. (Sirsasana -> urdhva dandasana -> sirsasana -> childs pose).

During quarantine I started supplementing my regular yoga asana practice with Dylan Werner’s True Strength series and I highly recommend it if people are wanting an incremental body weight training series. Lots of mobility work in there too.

I’d like to add one thing that is often overlooked and that is simply walking. It can help sort out a lot of problems by moving all joints in rhythmic manner.

Something really difficult to do nowadays with the COVID lockdowns...

I hope you can still walk outside alone with distancing!

Some countries have curfews where you have to be indoors before 6pm or 8pm, in some cases it's 1pm (Portugal last weekend).

"Shoulder dislocates with an aikido jo. Any rigid stick works, like a broom handle."

Can you elaborate ? I believe you are saying you intentionally dislocate your shoulder but I am skeptical that that is actually a thing ... I think maybe you mean you are adjusting, or popping, your shoulder ?

Genuinely curious ...

You don't actually dislocate your shoulder. It is just a drill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02HdChcpyBs

Yeah, as kasperni mentioned, it’s just a drill. Please don’t dislocate your shoulder on purpose! The method I use is the second variation in this video: https://youtu.be/vP8YmmRMz6I

You can vary the intensity of it by your hand positioning on the stick — start pretty wide at first and eventually reduce the width between your hands over time. Be careful with it and take your time, opening your shoulders takes a while (years).

I love this list.

Word about pull-ups. I was doing pullups 3X a week, and I tried not overtrain by a very very gradual increase over months in an Excel-sheet-level programming, since the pandemic and I got a pull-up bar at home. I was super careful. And yet it happened - it's called Golfer's Elbow and it's technically called medial epicondylitis, and it hella sucks. It lasts many months, it doesn't magically go away if you do nothing, because I think it's due to a muscle imbalance (impossible to confirm that via online research, just anecdotal), and it's very painful. In the mornings I get a stinging elbow pain just by lifting a piece of paper or scratching my head.

So careful with the pullups.

Your cat cow with wrists flipped sounds very intriguing, I'm going to explore that.

It's interesting that Yoga fixed you up. Glad that helped and thank you for sharing.

Absolutely, this is good advice to go easy on the pull ups. You really need to make sure you’re doing a good amount of stretching into the forearms, wrists, and all the way up into the fingers. The cat-cow variation with wrists flipped can help a lot with this — once this version feels good you can even advance into down dog with wrists flipped to keep opening further into the forearms. Gomukhasana arms help as well.

But for sure, the most important advice is to pay attention to your body and go easy on it when appropriate, injuries are no fun!

Another in addition to these excellent suggestions would be scapular pullups and scapular pushups.

> “I have usage of computers that far exceeds 90% of the population (12+ hours a day).”

Pre-pandemic, I trained Brazilian jiu-jitsu 5-6x per week - where people are trying to crank on my neck constantly. Your neck gets incredibly thick and strong as a result.

Even with that, I can say that NOTHING sets off my neck pain like 10+ hours at my computer.

Would you say a stronger neck reduces problems from the PC all day long?

I think strengthening/mobilizing anything on a regular basis helps prevent issues - I definitely have fewer neck and lower back issues after getting active 5-6x / week.

But the 10+ hour days still kill. Need to break those up with mobility.

Same with climbing/deadlifting. Six months into pandemic with all the gyms closed i started getting sore neck and accompanied migraines like twice a week... grrreat

Holding still for long periods is almost the worst thing for muscles. Basically your putting strain on the same set of muscles without actually granting them the sort of natural movement that keeps blood and stuff circulating properly.

> Yet. I suffer from neck pain

Have you tried cervical traction?

> Medicine: You Suck! We can send robots to Mars [...]

Seriously! Though maybe to be fair, the design of the spine isn’t that great. I mean it’s amazing. And simultaneously can’t take the abuse we pile on it. Whoever invents the cure to deteriorating joints and deteriorating nerves is going to solve half the world’s pain and also become very rich.

> Someone below wrote

Just curious - why not reply? Saying ‘below’ can be awkward when comments move around.

> Have you tried cervical traction?

Do you have any recommended products or procedures?

> Just curious - why not reply? Saying ‘below’ can be awkward when comments move around.

Because I wanted to expand the context of the thread, I guess? Spending time with a long response to a short comment in a nested thread structure felt like it would get buried.

Good question, I guess I’d recommend seeing a physical therapist first, and trying traction under guidance for a few weeks before buying anything.

I'm doing cervical spine traction right now... it makes my head hurt but I've found ways to do it that are less uncomfortable.

My story is similar to others here, I'm a lifelong athlete with some injuries that are exacerbated by computer usage. I now stand all day, every day with a monitor at head height, which has been the most impactful lifestyle change. Otherwise I do stretching, some exercises like in this article, deep breathing, and massage.

Looking forward to getting back to lifting and sprinting full-time, meanwhile though my cervical spine needs to become more stable. I'm never going back to sitting at a computer, because I literally can't! I suppose that's good ultimately but I do find it hard to concentrate on certain things while standing.

> it makes my head hurt

Oh that sounds potentially bad... I don’t know about you, but did find that I tended to turn up the pressure too high so that it feels like it’s giving my neck a good stretch. I’ve found that I can leave it quite low and get the same benefits without any pain. One or two docs have warned me in the past that it’s possible to make things worse if I do too much. So, anyway, be careful!

I’m in the same camp too, a life of sports and outdoor activity. I’ve crashed mountain biking a few times and suspect my neck trouble stems from or was accelerated by that. But when I told my doc that story, he listened and responded with “so what do you do for work?” I told him software, and he was like, “yeah, so I’d lean toward a couple of decades shitting in a chair with bad posture being your main problem.” That’s when I got the treadmill desk.

> I've been doing weightlifting (not bodybuilding which you should not do if you value your body long-term! Strength Training and a bit of Olympic Weightligting)

Much of what bodybuilders do is strength training, especially at the non-professional levels.

At amateur levels, effective strength training and effective body building are going to be pretty similar.

Yes and No. At least there are two big differentiators.

Olympic Weightlifting is generally understood to refer to the movements of clean+jerk, snatch, and associated movements like deadlifting and squatting which are components of the complex lifts.

Strength Training very broadly just means a rep range that makes you stronger, not bigger. But commonly one thinks of powerlifting movements: bench press, squats, deadlifts.

Notice in none of the above did we talk about bicep curls, pulley exercises, leg curls, or any concentration exercises. We didn't even talk about leg press, because in the above two we only use barbells.

So the two big differentiators are:

1. rep range is high with bodybuilding because bodybuilding cares about volume

2. This is the big one. The exercise range for bodybuilding includes many (perhaps mostly) single or few joint exercises.

So when you say that at the amateur level it doesn't matter, that's only true in that any amateur will get stronger. That's true. But the similarity ends right there.

I speak from experience when I say, starting off as an amateur by copying what bodybuilders are doing (bicep curls and other mirror exercises, high rep ranges and doing many single joint movements instead of functional movements) is a recipe for bad habits and movement patterns that you need to spend years to re-learn later. Not to mention machines are garbage and cause injury since they make you do unnatural things (unless you really know what you are doing, which amateurs do not).

> Strength Training very broadly just means a rep range that makes you stronger, not bigger.

There is no such thing (edit: well, except maybe 1-2 reps, because it's hard to get much volume with those. But beginners shouldn't be doing those anyway). You get stronger in the rep range you practice. People often (in gym circles) mean "1-rep strength" when they say "strength", but such a narrow definition only makes sense if you are competing in powerlifting.

As a beginner you want the rep range that maximizes gains/risk and also gains/unpleasantness ratio, which will usually be 5-10.

> rep range is high with bodybuilding because bodybuilding cares about volume

People who train for strength also care about volume because volume is a great way to get stronger. And also great way to get bigger. Which makes sense, because getting bigger is a great way to get stronger.

> starting off as an amateur by copying what bodybuilders are doing

I think this is where the most of the confusion comes from. It is bad to start amateurs on stuff that professional body builders do, but it would also be bad to start them on stuff professional powerlifters do (low bar one-rep max squats or speed deadlifts).

On the other hand, as an amateur, whether your goal is strength or better physique - the best approach is going to be very similar.

> Not to mention machines are garbage and cause injury since they make you do unnatural things (unless you really know what you are doing, which amateurs do not).

Some types of machines are absolutely fine (cable machines), other types are also mostly fine - they get a bad reputation from few of the worst offenders such as leg press and leg extension machine.

Just to add to this comment, strength increased with cross-sectional muscle area. Neural adaptation is not entirely separate, but yes the stimuli for increasing each can be generally separated into the low or high rep schemes. For those doing any sort of strength training, as long as you progress in weight for the first 3-4 years gaining muscle mass is unavoidable and not a bad thing at all. Hypertrophy is a well studied area of sport science and as long as you maintain a healthy diet, building muscle is not a negative thing in the least. It even helps with longevity by counteracting the muscle loss associated with aging.

Hold on. I know what you're trying to say, reps at 5-10 will give you strength benefits. But there's a nuance you're missing that's quite relevant to the discussion. There are different metabolic options for the muscle, since different muscle cell types behave differently and metabolize differently. There is power, strength and endurance, broadly speaking, with a lot of overlap of course depending on your movement speed, resistance and volume. Which is why that at above around the 5-10 range you mentioned, you begin to touch into the endurance/hypertrophy area.

Your comment about 1-2 reps not being good for beginners is questionable, though. It depends what you're training for. 1-2 reps is good or bad, but it all depends on what percentage of your max output you're attempting. a 1-2 rep range at something like an 85-90% of 1 RM isn't particularly offensive or dangerous, but it might not be optimal programming-wise if that is All you do. But it'll give you more strength increase faster than doing 8 reps.

Your "there is no such thing" comment is wrong, though. I have in front of me Practical Programming for Strength Training by Mark Rippetoe, and there is a whole chapter that discusses the three muscle fiber types, twelve characteristics, and their relation to rep ranges. There is a continuum of strength v. hypertrophy, and the rep-range of 5 and below being optimally useful for strength training. Sure, any rep range really where you're not doing cardio will lead to both strength and hypertrophy, Especially for an amateur, but there is a rapid fall-off at either end of the scale (low rep = more strength increase / higher rep = endurance + muscle hypertrophy).

In short: it's nuanced and I think your 5-10 number is again, a sort of "bodybuilding mentality" seeping into popular discourse, instead of a "good rule of thumb."

> 1-2 rep range at something like an 85-90% of 1 RM [...] will give you more strength increase faster than doing 8 reps.

It will give you more strength if you measure how much you can lift in a 1-rep set. It will give you less strength if you measure how much you can lift in an 8-rep set.

The key false dichotomy here is strength vs. hypertrophy. They are not in opposition, bigger muscle is a stronger muscle. To be as strong as you can, you need to do two things:

1) Get the biggest muscles you can.

2) Get practice in the rep range you are interested in being tested.

As good as Mark's books are, a lot has been researched and discovered since. For rep ranges in particular, this is a good article (backed by research): https://www.strongerbyscience.com/hypertrophy-range-fact-fic...

No, it's not a false dichotomy at all, or the first two pages of Google results on the topic are all wrong, powerlifting competitors are wrong (they should be doing 5x12 instead of 5x3, 5x1, 5x5 and many other rep schemes), Starting Strength as well as Practical Progamming for Strength Training are wrong and Rippetoe is a hack, my trainer (an olympic weightlifting competitor) is wrong, Alan Thrall's entire YouTube channel is false, and someone can make millions of dollars by showing that hypertrophy and strength are really one in the same and that there aren't three types of muscle fibers. This would have a huge impact in the fitness world if you were right. I don't think that's the case.

To be clear, neither I nor Greg Nuckols (author of the article I linked) claim that muscle fiber types aren't real.

In any case, if you or anyone else reading this are interested in learning more, here are some additional links:

- Size vs. Strength: How Important is Muscle Growth For Strength Gains? - https://www.strongerbyscience.com/size-vs-strength/

- Training Based On Muscle Fiber Type: Are You Missing Out? - https://www.strongerbyscience.com/muscle-fiber-type/

- Eddie Hall doing 10-rep sets when training for his 500 kg deadlift: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKPgu8JMY8k (which were explicitly called out as an important part of his training here: https://www.joe.co.uk/fitness-health/how-eddie-hall-trained-... )

If you're copying what the advanced (10+ years training) as a newcomer, that was your first mistake. Their training is specifically designed for someone who has the neural adaptation and muscle mass of a person with many years under their belt. You don't progress by doing the same thing for 10 years, that's antithetical to the ideas of adaptation concerning hypertrophy. Look up the lectures by Dr. Mike Israetel for good info.

Yeah, I know that copying what a 10 year bodybuilder is doing is no good and not the fault of bodybuilding as a sport. But I'm making an even bolder statement: that using concentration exercises like bicep curls, leg curls and (especially) 3-4 different angles of shoulder and chest work, espcially with machines and high reps, will very much increase your chances of injury.

I'm telling you that whenever I walk into a commercial gym or my building gym (i.e. not a powerlifting or oly gym) I see easily 90% of the people doing stuff I know is in bad form at worst, and at best will give them the most mild of training regimens. I blame the culture of bodybuilding (in the U.S. at least. I read that in Eastern Europe there is a very different attitude and training culture starting from school).

I argue that barbell training -- functional training more broadly, which includes calisthenics if you want -- is vastly safer and superior to bodybuilding and indeed yes, it does require a bit of personal training and instruction in the beginning.

IMO - just get the Starting Strength book by Mark Rippetoe and run with that for a year or two (or possibly forever depending on your goals). Quick gym sessions (45 min or less), strength focused exercises and IMO for those basic barbell movements it is the best.

If after you a bit of time you stall in strength and wish to go farther add in more bodybuilding type exercises or switch to another program like Wendlers 5/3/1...etc

But really if I had to recommend anything to most people to stay strong (esp as you age and live the lives we live today), the basic barbell exercises taught in Starting Strength are all you really need for a lifetime.

For years now I've been focusing on squat, standing press, and (when my elbows heal) pull-ups. My variation are pause squats (3 seconds down, 2 seconds hold, up fast), front squat, and now overhead squat. My variation for the standing ("strict press") is bench press, which I do 1X a week. I try to run 1X a week, sometimes 2X, but I'm inconsistent. I normally do 1X a week of deadlifts and ring rows but I have an elbow flare-up at the moment.

I do the three main ones (squat, press and pullup) 3X a week. No push day, no pull day, every workout is squat day. No machines -- evah! No curls. None of that. I do a small amount of accessory work for core, forearm muscles, and neck muscles, as well as PT work. I also spend a LOT of time warming up, probably 30 minutes. I'm in my lower 40's and recently tested with pretty solid testosterone of 670, and bloodwork is all good. I look way younger for my age. I also do intermittent fasting (really just skipping breakfast). I do drink, however.

There was a period when my gym closed during the pandemic and I had no alternative. I had to take a couple months off. Well, the muscles remained muscles (which does not happen so much with bodybuilders, who tend to get their muscles convert to fat pretty quickly), and after a few months I'm back to squatting pretty decently (I can do 1.6X my bodyweight for 5x5).

I absolutely recommend strength training for the older guy. Especially the PC nerd older guy.

I plan to continue weight training but cut out 1 day and instead learn proper calisthenics.

In the before times, I was doing olympic weightlifting as well, and I had very similar problems. I've always had weirdly loose shoulder joints (and can partially dislocate them), as well as weird things with the tendons in my knuckles. And when I started lifting, I would always have trouble with the jerk. Any time I did heavy jerks frequently, I would get escalating shoulder pain. As I trained more, I got better at maintaining shoulder stability. Power jerks still give me a lot of trouble, but split jerks are fine. Though with the pandemic, I haven't trained in months, and my shoulders are feeling all wonky again.

On a similar note, squatting was the absolute best thing for my knees. I had knee pain since I was about ten, and it didn't let up until I started squatting heavy. And whenever I would stop for a couple weeks, the pain would come back.

Likewise, I sourced old old knee and shoulder problems with squats and deadlifts. When I stop, the pain free days stop as well.

Pull ups help me a lot too. I think I do push ups wrong, they seem to cause trouble.

I have exactly the same thing. Plus last year (2020 was truly shitty) I developed a frozen shoulder, which now prevents me from doing many exercises that used to help me. My other shoulder is starting to hurt too now, and I’m mentally preparing myself to having both shoulders frozen this year. I have been to many doctors, and had lots of tests (x-ray, MRI,ultrasound) but they cannot find anything. Doctors are mostly useless for things like this. They are only helpful when you have accidents with obvious broken or damaged bonuses and tissues etc.

What's frozen shoulder?

Have you tried stretching (gently) the levator scapula stretch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSoXPJRnR6E)? I've recently started doing this 1-2 a day. I hold my elbow more to the sky and out than she is doing (sometimes using a doorway to help keep my elbow up), and I hold it for 1m on each side.

The levator scapula attaches to the cervical spine at one end, and the top of the scapula on the other. Shoulder and neck problems can occur in a chain and in a sort of domino effect.

I had frozen shoulder last year and it really sucked. I was pretty despondent as it didn't seem to be getting better going to physio endlessly, but eventually it started getting better and is pretty good now. Seems like a condition that isn't very well understood. It can be pretty debilitating.

> Medicine: You Suck! [its complex and doesn't work]

Having worked in drug development (and no longer do) I can tell you that everyone in the field knows it sucks and also that you should be (very favorably) astonished that it works at all.

Biological systems are so insanely complex that they are barely understood; most medical treatments are attempts to perturb a single variable (of a system with billions of variables) in the hope that it has a big enough positive effect.

Insanely complex mRNA vaccines are "trivial" by comparison.

When you make a spacecraft as you describe you may have a million moving parts. Their operating domain is well known, they typically only do one or two things, and they can operate in a system that can be isolated (this is the crew capsule; it operates in a vacuum and gets power from the power module...). By comparison a human body is many many billions of parts (brain itself is 80 giganeurons) including many that are not even human, all interacting in parallel (those 80 GN brain cells each has a dendritic fan out of around 10^5, plus new means of connection are still being found); all flooding with various signalling (electrical, hormonal, etc) which is the result of object code being extensively modified over 400 million years.

And that's just for a single organism (which is how we erroneously consider a human being). Humans are themselves parts of complex interacting extracorpal systems of food, actions, and other environmental factors which cannot be controlled because unlike a piece of metal or a silicon die in a ceramic package we interact with the majority of them.

There are a lot of very smart people in computer science but my qualitative impression is that while there a smaller proportion of smart people in the life sciences, the average IQ of those latter group is significantly higher.

Even though I still follow the literature, I have a "holy shit how did someone figure that out?" moment several times a week.

I also have neck issues, esp. when slouching over the laptop. Usually there is a point on the back of my neck that starts protruding. Then my neck and shoulder muscles get inflamed and I get pain, headaches, teary eyes and drowsiness. Usually things get better with an ibuprofen to calm the inflammation. But sometimes my wife needs to push really hard and massage until the protrusion goes back in. I can even feel it sort of click back into place and you can feel it skip while rubbing. It started years ago but it's sort of moved down closer to shoulder, it's not protruding in the same spot as before. One other thing I would do is take a rolling pin against the door frame to massage the neck or pull on the back of my head upward with a towel. Now I also do these neck exercises* and they really do help if I do them regularly, I also use a laptop stand whenever I can so I don't have to look down and slouch.

*https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/document/236321754/or... (I couldn't find it in english, sorry)

PS A neurologist and an orthopaedist told me that my symptoms don't make sense and they couldn't find anything wrong with my spine.

Careful! I would get an MRI which can see if you have a disk bulge or a bone spur. A protruding point does not sound good, but it sounds like something that medicine might possible be useful for for once.

Probably a disk bulge in my opinion, but it hasn't happened in a while now. I think the doctor dismissed it and told me that the disk can only bulge on the opposite side (inward), but I may be misremembering.

You have pushed your body to do something it wasn't designed to do, and over time, you broke it. It's very hard to get back.

You could have chosen another profession, but perhaps you'd have trouble with your knees then.

I had perfect vision for years, but a few years ago, things started to get blurry. Now I have to stop working after some hours because I just can't see the screen anymore, which would have been unthinkable a few years back. It feels pretty absurd having to stop just because you can't physically see anymore what you're doing.

I also do strength training and distance running – also to fight bad effects from prolonged computer use – which I guess keeps me pretty fit and healthy, but again, some part of the body might not be so happy and break down due to exercise.

As an adult, one's surprisingly left mostly to one's own devices when it comes to long-term holistic health. Most things beyond medical or mental emergencies are a lot harder to figure out, with a lot of fads, quacks and charlatans along the way.

I’m sorry. It’s terrible that people have to suffer from this kind of thing and get so little help from the supposed state of the art.

I'm sure that if we would 'relax' bioethics standards we could make faster progress.

Damn, I’m exactly on the same boat! I found that wearing a dental splint at night help a lot.