Episode 3 — You Are Not Falling Apart

We have spent so long warning people about the dangers of moving that we have forgotten to warn them about the dangers of staying still. And stillness is the far more reliable source of harm. When you do less, your body loses more, and it loses it quietly: muscle, bone, balance, cardiovascular fitness, insulin sensitivity. After 50, if you’re not training, you lose one to two percent of your muscle every year, and your power fades faster still. Falls, frailty, and dependence don’t simply happen to people. They build in silence, in the absence of motion, until one day they aren’t silent anymore. In this episode, an orthopedic surgeon of thirty years on why most of what we call aging isn’t aging, and why the body you’re afraid of breaking is far more capable than you’ve been told.

If you have knee osteoarthritis, this guide will tell you what most physicians do not have time to explain in a fifteen-minute office visit:

Written by Howard Luks, MD, an orthopedic surgeon with thirty years of practice, the guide covers what knee osteoarthritis actually is, why your X-ray does not determine your future, why metabolic health drives a large share of the pain and progression, the supplements with real evidence (and the ones without), what GLP-1 medications are doing for OA pain, when injections help and when they do not, why strength training is one of the most effective interventions available, and how to think honestly about surgery. The framing throughout is that you have more agency than the standard conversation gives you. No fluff. No fear. The levers you actually have, in a guide you can read in 30 minutes.

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