Chapter 2: A Painful Misunderstanding of Human Engineering

We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.

—David Russell

I know the treatment approaches used by the chiropractor, physical therapist, family doctor, orthopedic surgeon, and neurosurgeon aren’t working for your TOS, because they’re not working for anyone! It is because they are all based on a severely flawed model of biomechanics that doesn’t even abide by the laws of physics and nature!

We assume that all doctors and trainers approach the human body according to the equivalent of an engineer or physicist. In fact, they don’t.

Why do I know this? I have given formal presentations to more than 50,000 doctors and scientists from more than 50 countries. Many of your health problems come from you and your doctor not knowing how your body is engineered, and how to live in harmony with Earth’s gravity.

The study of how your body is engineered is called biomechanics.

Biomechanics might seem like a complicated subject, but there is a lot you already know about it on a practical level that forms the basis for everyday decisions, such as these concepts.

1. How to run.
2. How to throw a baseball.
3. How to type on a computer.

However more study in biomechanics is necessary to do these tasks effectively.

1. How to run the hurdles in a race at full speed.
2. How to throw a 90-mile-an-hour curveball.
3. How to type on a computer with the least shoulder and neck strain.

The five essential questions that must be answered to determine the most accurate model of the human body are as follows.

1. How is the body designed or engineered?
2. How does the body safely absorb impacts or collisions?
3. How does the body recycle energy for maximum efficiency?
4. How does the body engineer spaces for joints?
5. How does the body provide space for the safe passage of blood vessels and nerves?

The last idea is the most important for the understanding of how the safe passage, the thoracic outlet, becomes compressed causing thoracic outlet syndrome.

You might think that all doctors develop a vast knowledge of biomechanics, however, this is a new science. I have only taught a relative handful of doctors my more advanced model of human spring mechanics. The majority of health professionals know little to nothing about it.

So, it’s highly unlikely you’ll be learning this from your local physician anytime soon. Therefore, if you really want to know how to get out of chronic pain, you have to be willing to learn on your own.

What is exciting is that with this knowledge, you will be able to make more informed decisions on what treatments will work to reverse thoracic outlet syndrome and many other chronic conditions, what won’t work, and what will make you worse in the long run. I assure you that after you read this chapter, you will know more about why you are in pain than 99 percent of licensed physicians.

Many solutions to biomechanical issues have long been available to doctors; only a few have bothered to look for answers with any intensity until recent decades. Even if they were looking for answers, the secrets to how the body really works were not readily available. To compile this information, I had to interview approximately 1,000 national and world champions, top trainers, and sports scientists. And I read several thousand pages of scientific research. When it comes to the study of biomechanics, the medical community is stuck in the dark ages, left behind with a painful misunderstanding of human mechanics that is so outdated that they don’t even abide by the laws of physics and nature.

Therefore, employing these outdated approaches will almost guarantee a failure of your conservative treatment, leaving you in the state of chronic pain for years.

Until the 20th century, orthopedics, the branch of medicine related directly to the skeleton and muscles, joints, and ligaments, was mainly focused on straightening scoliosis, fixing broken bones, treating infections of the bone and joints, and other simple procedures.

It was only until the development of modern orthopedic surgical techniques, such as arthroscopic surgery, and the development of joint and limb replacements mandated doctors and scientists take the science of human movement to a new level.

The top five advancements in musculoskeletal medicine have been these.

1. Arthroscopic surgery
2. The use of nails, screws, and plates to stabilize unstable joints that are damaged or degenerated
3. Joint replacements
4. Digital X-rays
5. 3D models from computed tomography (CT) scans and MRI scan studies

Bioengineering

The science of bioengineering is the use of artificial tissues or components to replace damaged or absent parts of the body, such as artificial limbs. The push to continually improve the outcome of total joint replacements and limb replacements eventually led orthopedic surgeons to pay more attention to biomechanics and bioengineering to better understand how the body moves.

Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California. A below-the-knee amputee, Fields won a gold medal in the 100 meters with a time of 12.15 seconds at the Endeavor Games in Edmond, Oklahoma, on June 13, 2009.

The irony is that doctors work harder on understanding biomechanics so they can develop better hip and knee replacements, instead of understanding biomechanics that leads to the compression of the joints, which is the cause of the degeneration. There is more money in the replacements than the prevention.

Most important, doctors need to know how the thoracic outlet remains open and what controls the tension that closes it down. Simple anatomy has been the foundation of medical education, intervention, and communication for hundreds of years. With all the resources multiplying on the Internet, doctors should have a better grasp of anatomy than in the days I went to school, when we learned by dissecting a cadaver with the help of a paperback guide. But in fact, doctors are having a more difficult time understanding simple anatomy, specifically the anatomy of the thoracic outlet. That is because, in recent years, human anatomy has been slowly squeezed from the medical curriculum. Some suggest that it has fallen below a safe level.

Not only is there evidence that doctors are not learning enough anatomy to provide effective care, there is evidence that the lack of knowledge of anatomy has caused medicine to be a less safe practice for patients. Between 1995 and 2000, there was a seven-fold increase in malpractice claims associated with anatomical errors submitted to the United Kingdom Medical Defence Union (MDU), and 32 percent of claims, in general, made to the MDU. Malpractice claims for vascular surgery were reported most commonly for “damage to underlying structures” during surgery (1).

This is incredibly important, considering that vascular surgeons are the specialists called to do the surgery for thoracic outlet syndrome. They are expected to remove clots, repair blood vessels, cut out scalene muscles of the neck and the pectoralis minor muscle of the shoulder and chest, and surgically remove the first rib, all without causing damage to underlying structures. There are a lot of tiny nerves and blood vessels in the neck, chest, and shoulder.

Doctors’ overreliance on MRIs to diagnose demonstrates they don’t understand the body as an interconnected mechanism. They use chemicals to treat the body, when the problem is mechanical.

People keep defending these physicians saying, “That’s how they do it, according to the way they were taught or believe.” If the way they do it leaves you in chronic pain for life, then it is an incorrect way to approach thoracic outlet syndrome. Period!

What is the evidence that your doctor does not use the knowledge of biomechanics in the decision-making process?

Clue 1

Your doctor doesn’t take the time to ask you detailed questions about activities of your daily life that could be triggering your thoracic outlet syndrome.

Clue 2

Your doctor gives you a prescription for a chemical, a painkiller, or an anti-inflammatory drug, when your problem is mechanical.

Clue 3

The doctors order an MRI, based on your symptoms, instead of a full thorough examination. They don’t touch you where it hurts. When you think about it, these doctors are really not engineers of the body, but merely technicians who know how to remove fluids, put fluids back in, and replace parts when they are worn out. The fact is that hospitals would rather employ technicians who act as minions to carry out procedures that generate huge incomes, rather than thinkers, because the employed technicians will generate more income for the hospital.

So, if your doctor isn’t going to learn this, you have to learn it yourself. When you go to a personal trainer and ask, “What book would you recommend to learn how to train the body?” most well-educated trainers will ask you to qualify your goals. “Do you want to do resistance exercise or plyometric training?” Resistance exercise uses levers, while plyometric exercise uses the body’s spring mechanics.

Obviously, both are different. So, which one is the right one?

Both are right. The trainer is just developing one system over the other. Next time, ask your trainer to train the spring system and hand him or her a copy of this book.

Most doctors give you the owner’s manual, describing how you move by levers. What they give you is only half the owner’s manual—lesson one. This chapter you are reading now will be the second half of your owner’s manual—lesson two—which is most important, because it provides an explanation of the spring engineering of the thoracic outlet. In this chapter, you will come to recognize, beyond doubt, that the current model of how doctors think the body is engineered, the lever model, is a 340-year-old outdated model that doesn’t comply with even the most basic common-sense scientific principles.

Then, I am going to present you with the new, more logical, model of human engineering that has garnered me invitations to lecture all over the world at prestigious medical conferences.

We need these questions answered to determine how the body is engineered. To understand the cause of any particular musculoskeletal-related condition, including thoracic outlet syndrome, we need to look at how the body is engineered. To better understand that, we must look at how it lives in harmony in a world governed by the laws of basic physics and nature. These are some important questions to answer about engineering and the human body.

How is the body designed or engineered?

1. How is it engineered to protect itself from impacts or collisions during simple walking?
2. How is it designed to recycle energy for maximum efficiency?
3. How is it engineered to provide spaces, so joints won’t bang or grind down?
4. How is it engineered to provide safe passage of blood vessels and nerves through spaces or tunnels, like the thoracic tunnel or outlet?

Then, we must consider these questions of how the tension of the mechanism is controlled. That will give us the answers to how this marvel of engineering becomes compressed, causing thoracic outlet syndrome and a dozen or more other conditions that doctors find difficult to treat.

First, I think it is important to review the history of how these models have been developed, so you can get a better understanding of how long it takes to develop new models and approaches to exercise and medicine. It’s also important to study the history to understand how slowly the medical world is to innovate its examination and treatment and how long doctors will allow patients to suffer before adopting new common-sense approaches that provide far superior outcomes.

History

Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370 BCE) wrote about many sensible treatments of common ailments in his time and authored more than 171 books and articles on medicine and surgery, and, of course, he was the inspiration for the Hippocratic Oath, a text in which new physicians agree to uphold ethical standards.

The first real biomechanics experts date back to artist/mathematician Leonardo da Vinci and physicist Galileo Galilei in the 15th and 16th centuries, and later mathematicians Joseph Louis Lagrange, Daniel Bernoulli, Leonhard Euler, and Paul Thomas Young. All these scientists had a primary interest in the applications of engineering or mechanics to human movements, such as walking or running.

It was da Vinci who said, “The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art” and “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” He also reminded us that, “Learning never exhausts the mind.” So, I will try to keep this simple to keep your mind fresh while learning about your masterpiece.

Let’s walk through history together.

These are the models of human movement we are going to examine.

1. Inverted pendulum model, which is 340 years old and still the primary source of information for most doctors. a. Resistance exercise and the lever-series model, which is a vision of exercising the body and human movement propelled with a series of lever-like connections.
2. Spring-mass model, which acknowledges that the lower half of the body in motion operates as a spring mechanism.
3. Integrated spring-mass model, which is an advancement of the spring-mass model theorized by scientists from Harvard University that includes the upper body and head.

The Inverted Pendulum Model

The Spring-Mass Model

The Integrated Spring-Mass Model

Inverted Pendulum Model

In 1685, a Renaissance, Italian, physiologist, physicist, and mathematician, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli’s major achievements focused on explaining human movement or biomechanics (2).

Giovanni Alfonso Borelli

His publications, De Motu Animalia I and De Motu Animalium II (On the Movement of Animals), made comparisons between how animals and humans moved and machines. He attempted to shore up theories with mathematics.

Borelli’s core idea of walking was that we use the body’s levers to take our first step, leading with a stiff straight leg (little or no bending at the knee) in the ground and employ the back leg to vault the body mass over the planted limb. This aligns with the “walk heel toe” recommendations grandpa gave you 40 years ago.

Running, according to Borelli, was perceived to be a different process—as a rebounding or bouncing off compliant or bent legs (2). This is where his model breaks down and makes no sense. However, doctors and scientists still embraced this illogical model and, in fact, based all examination and treatment approaches around it. This is why, to many of you, the method of examination and treatment currently used by doctors makes no sense.

However, because of this early important work, Borelli has been labeled as the father of modern biomechanics. The American Society of Biomechanics dubs its highest honor for research, the Borelli Award.

His walking model became known as the inverted pendulum and is still the go-to reference for many doctors today. You know a doctor is using this outdated concept when they push the “heel toe” walking technique. It relies mainly on the idea that the body is a fixed, stiff structure that moves by pushing with levers.

If you knew a machine you were designing had to take 10,000 steps a day for 365 days a year (3,650,000 collisions with the ground a year), would you design it with levers?

Impossible!

Levers are not designed to resist impacts. In fact, I guarantee if you approached every engineer in the world and asked, “How can I design the human mechanism to safely absorb the forces of 287,000,000 collisions with the ground in its lifetime by only using levers? It’s impossible to do. That is your proof that the medical profession has misdiagnosed the biomechanical model of human movement.

So, for close to 340 years and counting, scientists and doctors followed this illogical model, which said that walking was performed by using an inverted pendulum model, such as vaulting over stiff legs, but running was like rebounding off compliant legs (3–4).

Resistance Exercise and the Lever-Series Model

In the early 1980s, the sports and fitness community modeled the early exercises approach after the lever-series model. That gave birth to weight lifting, or resistance exercise, which was made popular by the sport of bodybuilding. Early on, weight training or resistance exercise was the only approach taught in fitness clubs and through Joe Wieder’s fitness magazines, such as Shape and Muscle & Fitness, featuring icons, including globally popular Arnold Schwarzenegger. At the time, the majority of physicians warned against weight training that it would enlarge your heart among other misunderstandings. However, Joe Wieder and others, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, spent their lives educating doctors about how it was beneficial to health—another illustration of how physicians’ knowledge and understanding of healthy movement was decades behind sports sciences.

The medical profession, for centuries, has based all examinations and treatment approaches on the theory that the body only moves by levers. Therefore, the only way the doctors examine you is by bending your levers.

Think of how doctors examine your knee. They bend it back and forth, up and down, and almost never evaluate how the other joints are integrated or affect movement of the knee. When they can’t figure out what’s wrong, they order an MRI.

Many lever-model-only thinkers believe impacts injure the body, which is why they recommend cushioned shoes for all running and sports activities. This idea was put to the test by researchers led by Daniel E. Lieberman, a professor in Harvard’s new department of human evolutionary biology, in a paper published in Nature in 2010 (5). They concluded— “Most people today think barefoot running is dangerous and hurts, but actually you can run barefoot on the world’s hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain. All you need is a few calluses to avoid roughing up the skin of the foot. Further, it might be less injurious than the way some people run in shoes” (5).

I was the first science lecturer to say, three years before the Harvard study was published, that barefoot training was better than using shoes. I presented this lecture, “Elastic Recoil Mechanisms— How Footwear Accelerates the Aging Process,” to more than 2,500 doctors and scientists at the 15th Annual World Congress on Anti-Aging Medicine and Regenerative Biomedical Technologies in 2007 in Chicago, Illinois.

It was the most advanced conceptual model at that time for our understanding of how the body moves and (6–7) incorporated many of the concepts understood from plyometrics experts.

The researchers perceived that when walking or running, the muscles, tendons, and ligaments in our legs behave together, like single, linear springs (8). Their model assigns the human leg with the properties of a simple spring (9) and describes the mechanics of running and other bouncing gaits remarkably well (7) (10 –13).

A spring can be defined as an object that deforms in shape and absorbs and stores energy when force is applied. Ideally, it reforms to its original shape on the release of that energy. It provides protection from impacts and recycles energy; the more spring, the more protection and energy.

The presumptions behind the model fail to allow for an explanation of how the body protects itself from those 287 million collisions, how the body recycles energy, and how it provides spaces and tunnels for the safe passage of blood vessels and nerves throughout the body.

This is the main reason why the current medical model, fails you when you are suffering from the symptoms of your body being chronically compressed, like a herniated disc or thoracic outlet syndrome. It is also why doctors have no luck reversing chronic arthritis pain, degeneration, and chronic fatigue.

Go to my website www.teamdoctorsblog.com and read the article, “Why I Run Barefoot.”

Plyometrics

In 1986, I had just graduated from chiropractic college. My goal was to treat elite athletes and also to train them and create champions. With this in mind, I was curious why the Russians were winning so many gold medals at the Olympic Games. I contacted Dr. Michael Yessis, a teacher, sports performance trainer, biomechanist, and author, who had translated into English many of the more important scientific papers of the top Russian sports scientists.

He published these important sports science papers in the Soviet Sports Review periodical. I repeatedly read every single study from 1966 to 1986, noting many of the same names kept popping up in research, especially professor Yuri Verkhoshansky. In 1986, at age 24, I was chosen to be the doctor for the US powerlifting team to compete in Moscow and Leningrad against the Soviet Union. While in Moscow, in 1987, I asked competition organizers if they could facilitate a meeting with Verkhoshansky, and the request was granted.

Subsequently, I had an opportunity to study under one of the most influential sports scientists of the last century. At age 26, I expanded on that experience by organizing the first course in sports medicine for Western doctors in the former Soviet Union at the National Moscow Institute of Physical Culture and Sport in Moscow, Russia, in 1988 that featured scientific presentations from Verkhoshansky and many other top Russian sports scientists.

Professor Verkhoshansky developed a training approach that was vastly different to traditional weight-lifting drills and resistance exercises. It didn’t work the lever systems. It developed the elastic mechanisms, or what I call spring mechanisms. This discipline became known as plyometrics.

The fundamental concept in plyometrics is that there is a form of elastic energy in the body that is trained. In this process, when the body lands, it deforms its shape, as it compresses to absorb the force of impact. Then it stores this energy. When it returns to its exact, original shape during the jump, it then releases this energy. This is the exact definition of a spring.

It demonstrated to sports scientists that using traditional, lever-resistance exercises, such as weightlifting/bodybuilding, was not a complete approach. Instead, they introduced high-impact drills that tuned the recoil capacity of the body, reducing risk of injuries of impacts, increasing speed, quickness, and endurance, to mention a few. Fast, powerful movements performed in rapid sequence formed the core of plyometric training, which continues to be refined to this day. In those early days (the 1980s), when plyometrics was new on the sports scene, there was some controversy, stemming from negative claims about its safety led by medical professionals. The doctors had a limited understanding of anatomy and had virtually no understanding of biomechanics back then. This made it difficult for them to form an educated opinion of what was good or bad for the body. Because of their lack of wisdom, they warned athletes that the high-impact, plyometric approach to training would damage the body, because levers weren’t designed to resist collisions.

Coincidentally, that is when shoe manufacturers pounded the airwaves with commercials that suggested sports or leisure activities involving impacts weren’t safe, without adding an artificial spring, engineered with thick rubber, air, or gel pockets in the sole. In fact, they tried to buy off top, barefoot, African runners, like Abele Biliki, with huge sums of money, to convince the public that you couldn’t compete and win a marathon without wearing a pair of their shoes. However, Mr. Biliki of Ethiopia won the 1960 Olympic marathon running barefoot in Rome, Italy, on hard cobblestones streets. Winning the Olympic gold medal established Biliki as the fastest, long-distance runner in the world. Now you know why I am a barefoot runner.

I am not only a barefoot runner, but one of the first doctors who was invited to lecture on the science of barefoot running as early as 2007 with the presentation, “Elastic Recoil Mechanisms—How Footwear Accelerates the Aging Process.” This presentation was delivered to more than 2,500 doctors and scientists at the 15th Annual World Congress on Anti-Aging Medicine and Regenerative Biomedical Technologies in Chicago, Illinois, United States.

I lectured again about how we can run safely barefoot, with lectures at medical conferences in Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, and China, by understanding the body is thought of as a spring mechanism versus a lever system.

Not only do we all have a powerful, natural spring integrated in our body’s engineering, our brain has the capacity to control the tension on our spring mechanism to safely land on the hardest surfaces on Earth. It also has the ability to adjust the tension on our spring to spring back from impacts that generate forces up to 10 times body weight, without causing damage.

Understanding how the brain and nervous system control the tension on your spring is the secret to understanding how it can cause internal compression on your thoracic outlet and tunnel, that is, thoracic outlet syndrome Fortunately, athletes and coaches embraced plyometrics and ignored the doctor’s warnings—after all, they knew more about the body’s performance capabilities than the medical community.

Gradually, plyometric training made its way into every US college and the country’s top professional teams, as it was touted by leading professors, trainers, and athletes as the most advanced training approach ever developed.

Today, it is a popular and safe method of strength training for athletes, nonathletes, and even children, complementing other major components of training schedules, especially resistance exercise using levers (weightlifting).

So how does the body really move? Does it move as a lever or as a spring?

The answer is both!

• The body moves as a lever series, when doing resistance exercise-like movements.
• The body moves with spring mechanisms, when walking, running, jumping, and engaged in plyometrics.

Your spring engineering is what allows you to safely land your body when walking, so the impact doesn’t put stress on your joints, which can lead to early degenerative arthritis and chronic pain. The spring mechanism provides the engineering to recycle energy during walking and running to allow you to be most efficient, so locking of these mechanisms can lead to chronic fatigue Most important, for this book, the discs of your spine and the thoracic outlet tunnel are engineered with spring mechanics to maintain the safe passage of blood vessels and nerves. That is why doctors have such a difficult time understanding, evaluating, and treating thoracic outlet syndrome and herniated discs. But what does the doctor do?

Doctors examine and treat you as a lever mechanism when, in fact, you are a combined lever and spring mechanism. Subsequently, the rehabilitation process focuses on restoring the lever component, while your spring mechanisms remain compressed or locked. This is when exercise actually accelerates the aging of the body rather than reverses it.

Are you starting to get the picture?

Spring-Mass Model

Even though sports scientists were convinced as far back as the 1970s that the body’s spring was the key component in optimizing movement efficiency (plyometrics), the medical community continued to cling to the idea that the body was only designed as a lever mechanism.

This atmosphere of conflict between the traditional medical and sports science communities was still rampant when a group of scientists at Harvard University developed a model that elaborated on the concepts that many trainers and athletes had embraced for decades.

About 1989–1990, Harvard University scientists Blickhan, Cheng, and McMahon introduced the spring-mass model. This model represented the legs as springs and the head as the non-spring-like mass. This model better explains how the body absorbs collisions and recycles energy.

It was the most advanced conceptual model at that time for our understanding of how the body moves and (6–7) incorporated many of the concepts understood from plyometrics experts.

The researchers perceived that when walking or running, the muscles, tendons, and ligaments in our legs behave together, like single, linear springs (8). Their model assigns the human leg with the properties of a simple spring (9) and describes the mechanics of running and other bouncing gaits remarkably well (7) (10) (11) (12–13).

A spring can be defined as an object that deforms in shape and absorbs and stores energy when force is applied. Ideally, it reforms to its original shape on the release of that energy. It provides protection from impacts and recycles energy; the more spring, the more protection and energy. When walking or running, your body makes impacts or collisions with the ground. Human spring mechanisms not only cushion impacts, but also perform substantial work. The spring suspension system muscles, tendons, joints, and bones are designed specifically to dissipate, store, and even return substantial energy to the body (14).

Most important for you, the stronger the spring is, the more capable it is in maintaining the thoracic outlet and keeping the tunnel open for the safe passage of blood vessels and nerves.

The weight of the body loads into the ankle and foot. Upon landing, the muscles of the calf contract to set the exact tension on the tendons to absorb the landing safely. The force of the landing is loaded into the arch by stretching the tendons, like pulling back the elastic bands of a human slingshot.

The energy does not come from muscle contraction. It comes from the stretching of the tendons (15).

Tendons are considered extension springs, because they stretch to store energy then release back to their normal length on toe off, releasing energy, springing you off the ground.

Although the stretching can provide some of this work, the elastic energy stored in tendons (16–17) and the contracting muscles have to provide the force necessary to support the body and maintain tension in the spring-like tendons.

So, when a body’s spring mechanism is intact, and it is a strong and evenly balanced spring energy, your spring can spring your body off the ground, protecting you from impacts and allowing you to be less tired and less impact force that can cause damage to the floors of your human spring above.

The spring-mass theory suggests that the majority of the shock absorption occurs in the legs and to a lesser degree in the spine (18). Even though the researchers admitted the spine acted as a spring, they did not include it in their basic model. That is the reason why doctors have such a tough time understanding how to treat herniated or bulged discs and thoracic outlet syndrome.

There might only be a handful of physicians in the world who have ever heard of the spring-mass model or any model of human movement, for that matter. Most are technicians and not engineers. In fact, the doctors from the 35 countries who attended my lecture introducing my new integrated spring-mass model at the 2014 World Congress in Sports and Exercise Medicine asked me after the presentation “Where did you get all this from?”

How does the spring-mass model provide an explanation for conditions caused by compression of the neck, shoulders, and chest, such as herniated discs and thoracic outlet syndrome?

This is where the spring-mass model is lacking; it does not provide a model for the foot and the entire body above the waist. So, it’s just limited to the legs as springs.

The spring-mass model does not provide a model for the entire foot with its arch.

It models all the body parts above the waist as mass.

Obviously, for those of you who have neck pain, upper back pain, shoulder pain, headaches, and a diagnosed or suspected thoracic outlet syndrome, this is the area we need to be modeled correctly, so we can determine the best approach to restore the outlet and tunnel opening.

Just think how athletes tackle one another at top speeds with the shoulder and neck contact. If it wasn’t designed as a spring mechanism, to spring back from these impacts, the neck would get crushed with every tackle, sending us immediately to the emergency room on a stretcher. The sports of football, ice hockey, rugby, tumbling, parkour, and even running sports would cease to exist.

How does this apply to your thoracic outlet syndrome?

The only way to answer how the body maintains the safe passage of blood vessels and nerves through the thoracic outlet is by understanding my more advanced model, the integrated spring-mass model, nicknamed the human spring model.

Integrated Spring-Mass Model, aka the Human Spring Model

I theorized the more advanced, integrated spring-mass model, nicknamed the human spring model, out of necessity because there was no other model that explained the five essentials of human biomechanics we talked about earlier. I presented components of the model and how it applies to the treatment of thoracic outlet syndrome at medical conferences in Bangkok, Thailand; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and throughout the United States.

The integrated spring-mass model suggests that the entire body is an integrated or connected series of springs, forming one giant spring. The mass is the head, because it does not have spring capabilities.

Crucially, this is the only model that abides by the laws of physics and nature and, most important, common sense. Because the entire theory in the lecture is backed by scientific studies in peer-reviewed journals, not one medical professional has ever disputed my approach during my lecturing around the world throughout the past decade.

The spring-mass model does not include a nervous system to control the stiffness of the spring, to adjust for various environmental factors and programmed habitual movement of daily life, such as walking.

You will learn how the nervous system controls the tension on your spring mechanism in Chapter 4, “The Control of Tension on Your Human Spring.”

Human Spring Model Explains the Mysteries that the Lever Model Cannot

1. The human spring model demonstrates the lower limbs and spine as torsion springs that spring the body back from collisions.

This is like the advancement from the old shocks that cars had in the early days to the torsion bar suspension, also known as torsion spring suspension. It is a general term for any vehicle suspension that uses a weight-bearing spring that is a compression spring and a spring that absorbs stress with a twisting, spring-like motion.

A demonstration of how a torsion spring works occurs when you wring out a wet towel. When you wring it out, the towel changes its shape and stores energy. Then when you release it, it unwinds to its original shape, releasing energy. That is a simple torsion spring.

The human spring model models the lower leg, the foot and its arch as a suspension spring that springs the body off the ground with extension springs which are the tendons. It models the lower limbs and spine as torsion springs capable of storing elastic energy with torsional movements.

1. The human spring model extends the spring engineering beyond the legs to model the spine as a torsion spring composed of compression springs, which are the discs between the vertebrae.

Because we have extended the model to the head, we can now understand how to study the areas where thoracic outlet syndrome develops. It also allows us to develop better approaches to examination, treatment, and prevention of conditions, such as herniated discs in the neck too, so if the treatment I outline here is effective for thoracic outlet syndrome, it is equally effective for herniated discs in the neck.

More important, it is a better model to be able to predict what postures and repetitive movements will cause friction, strain, and compression of your body’s spring. For this, we have to understand better how the nervous system controls tension on the spring with various standing and sitting positions in addition to various movements.

1. The human spring model shows the head as a mass that balances on top of the spring.

The head is modeled as a bowling ball structure that balances precariously on top of a six-story torsion spring. This might give you a better appreciation of how the positions of the head and arms affect the tension on the spring and the thoracic outlet tunnel.

We can use the laws of physics (gravity), the laws of nature (spring weakness versus spring strength), and the understanding of how the brain patterns repetitive postures and patterns of movement to determine how your spring can be expanded, for injury protection, or how it can become compressed, leading to increased risk of injury.

This would explain how you acquired thoracic outlet syndrome and why it won’t go away.

1. The human spring model provides the shoulder with suspension springs that form the outlet and tunnel for blood vessels and nerves to pass.

Your shoulder is suspended from above by muscles that attach at the neck, forming a tunnel, which provides a safe passage for the nerves and blood vessels. There are other opposing muscles that pull your shoulder down into the tunnel. Understanding this will give us a clear understanding about the muscles to treat to release the compression from the outlet and the muscles to strengthen to help better suspend the shoulder higher so that you have a wider and stronger outlet and tunnel. In the integrated spring-mass model, your entire body is one giant spring, composed of multiple floors of springs. In fact, millions of tiny springs, such as muscle fibers, ligaments, and tendon fibers act as rubber bands to load energy in and elastically spring back the energy.

There are extension springs that suspend body parts, compression springs that bounce body parts off one another, and even elastic, balloon-like springs that help your heart beat and your chest expand and contract allowing you to breathe easier.

This is the key to understanding how I can run barefoot for miles on solid concrete at age 53. It also explains how top athletes can collide head-on and neck first at top speeds and not suffer injuries to the thoracic outlet area, yet you are sitting quietly at your desk without trauma and your thoracic outlet is severely compressed, causing excruciating chronic pain and suffering.

How the body is designed as a spring mechanism, how the nervous system modulates tension, and how too much tension on your spring can affect human performance was the subject of the presentation I gave at the World Congress in Sports and Exercise Medicine on August 26, 2014, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The title of the lecture was, “How Athletes, Coaches, Trainers and Physicians Can Improve Human Performance by the Earliest Detection, Intervention and Prevention of Spring Stiffness Over Modulation.” On September 4, 2015, I gave the keynote presentation, “The Sports Medicine’s Approach to Anti-Aging Medicine,” at the Seventh Annual Thailand Congress on Anti-Aging and Aesthetic Medicine, held in Bangkok, Thailand. You can watch the entire presentation online on this YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/TeamDoctorsCenter.

You can also find the video of the lecture, “The Integrated Spring-Mass Model to Understanding the Earliest Detection, Intervention, and Prevention of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome,” I gave for the A4M Thailand World Congress on Anti-Aging Medicine, 2017. In the presentation, I expanded on this concept of overactivity or overcontrol of the nervous system, which leads to compression of the human spring mechanisms. It is the most likely cause of degenerative arthritis and chronic compressive disorders, such as thoracic outlet syndromes, herniated discs, and many other conditions.

Once you learn the secrets to human spring engineering, you will begin to solve the mysteries of many chronic conditions, disorders, and diseases. There are more clues to the mysteries, which will be answered in the next two chapters.

Now let’s spring to action!