Scott Anderson, Ph.D.

With the recent diagnosis of severe osteoarthritis in my right knee, I’m deploying regular Pilates practice, keeping my weight down and reducing inflammation as among the “levers” that I can pull to extract every last bit of mileage out of the original equipment. I hope to postpone replacing this knee for as long as possible. Knee replacement outcomes have improved over the past 10+ years Surgeries of all types are invasive. At minimum, recovering from anesthesia, particularly general anesthesia, often takes longer than expected. And then there’s the recovery from the surgery, itself, which depending on the location and type, can take weeks to months. I consider surgery a last-resort treatment for the vast majority of conditions. That being said, I will have my R-knee replaced at the appropriate time. The “appropriate time” varies from person to person. In my studio teaching, clients often ask my opinion about whether or not to pursue joint replacement. While there’s no objectively “ri...

Aging is many things, though at essence it's the experience of inflammation. Inflammation is a natural and necessary physiologic response to the stressors that occur throughout the lifespan. Unfortunately, our capacity to manage inflammation tends to decline as the years go by, and inflammation tends to increase along with chronological age. As a result, we tend to become less resilient to stressors of all kinds due to the inflammation that generally accompanies aging. Many scientists define resilience as "the rapidity in recovering from adverse events." In our youth, when we overdo a workout, we may feel tired and sore the next day. However, we generally bounce back from the soreness quite quickly and are back to full-capacity within a day or two. The recovery from the adverse event is rapid. With aging, on the other hand, a single overdoing episode may leave us feeling tired and sore for multiple days, if not longer. The recovery from adverse events is slow. Muscle sore...

  The forces on the knee are often more than 2-3 times your body weight . While walking, for example, a 150 pound person has 300-450 pounds of pressure on the knee joint. Thankfully, knees are designed to handle these loads, though high-mileage knees often hurt more when exposed to greater loads. For that reason, one of the front-line treatments for knee arthritis is weight loss . Weight loss can be a triggering subject for many, though reducing body weight by even 10-pounds can significantly reduce pressure on the knees. Every ounce counts when it comes to high-mileage knees. While I’ve generally been pretty lean over my life, my weight has fluctuated over the years. And like so many of us, the net trajectory of my body weight has been upward, particularly since entering midlife. When the orthopedist showed images of the “severe osteoarthritis” in my knee and suggested full knee-replacement as a treatment option, I took a hard look at my body weight. As we age, we all tend to los...

  When I practice Pilates 3+ days per week, my knees do not hurt. With less frequent Pilates practice, my right knee reminds me of all the wear and tear that’s shown in both the X-rays and MRI. Over the course of the past decade or so, this pattern has remained true, and I have come to rely upon Pilates as one of the three tools I use to manage what orthopedists consider a worn-out joint. When many people think of Pilates, they tend to mention “core strength” or how Pilates helps loosen up stiff joints. While a strong core and supple spine are definitely among the benefits arising from a Pilates practice, I have come to believe that the Pilates secret sauce is how it benefits postural alignment. The first step in improving alignment is to connect lower-ribs with the abdomen. In an era of staring at handheld screens, sitting in cars and working at computers, most of us developed a head-forward habitus. Perhaps you’ve experienced the tight neck and shoulders that often accompany hea...

As far back as I can my remember, my right knee has been funky. Thankfully "funky" hasn't involved much pain, though my right knee has long been unstable. And this instability was accompanied by intermittent clicking, locking and grinding. Sensations of grinding within a joint, perhaps not surprisingly, generally indicate that something is ground. A nd that something is generally cartilage; in my case, both hyaline cartilage (articular) and fibrocartilage (meniscus) were ground away by the bedstones of my femoral chondyles and runner stones of the tibial plateaus. As can be seen in the accompanying image, years of this "milling" ground away the cartilage. The formerly plump space between thigh bone and shin bone no longer exists, indicating the state of "bone on bone." Upon viewing the X-ray and MRI images, the orthopedist shot a sympathetic look my direction and asked me how I was managing the pain. His hand seemed to almost tremble in anticipation...

One pound is not the same as one kilogram. While that may or may not seem like an interesting factoid, its influence on dietary choices is significant. While current dietary recommendations suggest consuming approximately 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body mass, many pundits are incorrectly suggesting that people consume 1 gram of protein per pound of body mass. This is not a trivial difference - for me, this is the difference between consuming 190 grams of protein per day and 70 grams of protein per day. The former generally necessitates a diet that's very low in fiber, while the latter is entirely do-able on the high-fiber diet that supports a healthy microbiota. This error reminds me of an unfortunate mistake that created a $135-million puff of smoke . In 1999, as part of the emerging Small Spacecraft Technology initiative, NASA sent the Mars Climate Orbiter to research the make-up of the Martian climate. Designed to orbit the Red Planet  and determine the location of w...

The hearse pulled into my family’s driveway at the appointed hour. My parents mentioned that an artist was stopping by, though I had no idea the artist’s entrance would imprint so indelibly in my mind. From his ginormous, black hearse, to the wild hair and beard, this man-in-black was the antithesis of the early-1970s, suburban world that I inhabited. My adoptive parents were thoroughly suburban. We had lots of stuff, and hungered for the stuff that we didn’t have. I thought nothing of this – it’s how all my friends and I lived. With one sentence, however, the artist showed me another view of all this stuff, initiating a conflicted relationship with stuff that I’ve been working with for 50+ years. Repurposed hearses are really big station wagons that can haul lots of things. As he entered our house, he hesitantly said “You have lots of… things .” The pause on “things” was pregnant with meaning, and even though I was scarcely of school-age, I grokked the layered meanings implied by the ...