Liz Aitken, Registered Massage Therapist

Managing Menopause Symptoms How menopause affects arthritis

Every woman needs to hear this from Dr. Vonda Wright. Dr. Vonda is one of the world’s top experts on mobility, aging, and longevity, and her research is rewriting the script on what’s possible for your body as you get older. Getting older doesn’t mean decline. It means you train smarter, move with intention, and protect your strength for the long haul. If you want to stay strong, capable, and confident in your body, do not skip this episode of The Mel Robbins Podcast. 🎧 “Look, Feel, & Stay Young Forever: #1 Orthopedic Surgeon’s Proven Protocol.” Watch here: https://youtu.be/gO_x3gnXBzg

Cognitive neuroscientist Dan-Mikael Ellginsen from the University of Oslo in Norway led a 2016 review that highlighted three ways that we experience touch.

1. Gate of attention: This refers to where the focus of your body is. It’s basically your brain’s way of selecting specific stimulus to pay attention while filtering out others.

For example, clients might not realize they have a “sore spot” until you touch that area. Another more mundane example is when you’re sitting on your couch watching a movie, you probably aren’t aware of your seat pressing against your bottom or how your feet and legs are positioned unless you bring awareness to those body parts.

2. Prediction: This is where you anticipate what something feels like before you even touch it. One example in massage therapy is how some clients expect a massage would feel based on their prior experience.

If they find deep tissue massage alleviates their back pain, then it’s likely beneficial to them. The same could be said for those who find light touch massage, like Swedish, to be beneficial.

3. Context: Sensory inputs, such as visual and auditory cues from who is touching you, how you feel, and where your environment is. For example, being touched during a massage or physiotherapy session by a qualified therapist is quite different than having a random customer touch you at a coffee shop.

Sometimes C-tactile fibers do a “hedonic flip” where the same soothing touch can feel very threatening, or at best, uncomfortable. A common example is how sensitive the skin gets around an injured or inflamed area. Such clues support the idea that the change of C-tactile fiber function motivates you to protect the injured part.

“Given the strong contextual influences on touch pleasantness, it is unknown whether there are qualities of certain touch stimuli that inherently carry a positive hedonic value (i.e., are pleasant or give rise to positive affect), or whether the hedonic value of touch is always dependent on other contextual or internal factors,” Ellingsen et al. wrote.

Details: https://massagefitnessmag.com/massage/skin-sensory-receptors/

Why is women’s health still so misunderstood? To answer that, today I’m joined by four world-leading experts redefining women’s health. Dr Stacy Sims is an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist transforming female performance. Dr Natalie Crawford is a fertility doctor helping women understand their bodies and cycles. Dr Mary Claire Haver is a menopause expert and creator of The Galveston Diet for hormone balance. Dr Vonda Wright is an orthopaedic surgeon and longevity researcher guiding women stay strong for life. Women are the majority of the population, yet less than 2% of medical research focuses on female-specific conditions. For decades, medicine was built on male data and it’s left women misdiagnosed, misunderstood, and underrepresented. When women don’t get the right care, we all lose. We cover: - What’s really happening to women’s hormones at different life stages? - Why do so many women feel unheard by their doctors? - Is birth control doing more harm than good? - What doctors still get wrong about menopause and fertility? - Why understanding your cycle could change your health forever… What stood out to me most was how much we still don’t know about women’s health. Hearing how often women are dismissed or misdiagnosed was shocking. You might think this episode’s only for women, but the truth is it’s for all of us. As a man, I’ll never experience it myself, but conversations like this have made me realise how important it is that we all understand the female body better. This is Part 1 of our discussion, and Part 2 is coming next where we go deeper into the emotional, social, and relational side of women’s health. #health #womenshealth #podcast

BC residents can now text for chronic pain support. Connect with real people who can help you:
✅ Emotional support
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📱 1-833-261-PAIN (7246)

Jeff Cavaliere reveals the 5 exercises you need to stay mobile! #gym #health #fitness