Cause Of Poor Posture

The Cause Of Poor Posture In Children And Adults ©

See also
You Tube video on poor posture
An excellent film clip, about the cause and treatment of poor posture which was used for educating children in the early 20th century.
It was called Health: Your Posture by – Centron Corporation
here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PE4qraeR9o

My commnents and criticism of it can be seen here

A Cause Of Poor Posture

The child in the photos above had numerous health problems. At age one he had an operation to repair a hernia in the right groin. In the early years, probably spread between the ages of one to five, he had several infectious illnesses which included chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough and diphtheria.

The photo on the left shows the child aged two to three years old. He is seated, with bright eyes, a healthy and robust physique, square shoulders, and a straight spine.

Between the age of three and seven he slept a spring mesh bed which sagged in the middle. At the age of five he contracted the measles which infected the muscles of the left eye and caused a squint which was treated by two operations. Afterwards he was required to wear a patch over the healthy eye to force the other one to return to normal function, but these measures failed so he was prescribed spectacles with greater magnification in the left lens than the right. He also had all of his primary teeth removed in one dental operation and the permanent teeth grew crowded together. At the age of six he contracted hepatitis and was hospitalised for six months during which time he lost much of his body weight. The changes in physique which resulted are obvious in the middle photo which shows the same child at age of six to seven sitting slumped and crumpled forward with very rounded shoulders sloping more on the right than the left, and wearing spectacles with greater magnification in the left lens.

He had his tonsils removed by surgery at age 10 to stop the recurrence of sore throats and colds. During his later childhood his parents and teachers frequently criticised his slouching and his habit of leaning on his elbows at the meal table or the school desk, but his well-intentioned doctors advised him that if he felt comfortable and relaxed while slouching it would do him no harm.

The photo on the right shows the same child aged 12. He is wearing spectacles with greater magnification in the left lens, and his facial expression shows that he is relaxed and comfortable. His physique is thin, his spine is stooped and his body is slumped, and his right shoulder is lower than his left, his chest is flattened and leaning to the right, and his legs are bowed.

This child played a lot of sport throughout his teenage years but his adult life featured numerous health problems which included multiple knee injuries involving the medial cartilages, aches and pains in both kidneys and multiple kidney stones including obstructive stones in the left kidney, chronic upper abdominal pain, and chronic fatigue with exertion impairment (the effort syndrome), breathing abnormalities, high blood pressure, and chronic recurring aches and pains in the neck and right shoulder. Many symptoms were variously induced or aggravated by sustained or repetitive postures, or by bending, twisting, or arching the spine.

For similar information on the cause of Robert Louis Stevensons physique.

For more information on the cause, treatment, and prevention of poor posture see The Posture Theory And Education Webpage.

You Tube video on the cause and treatment of poor posture
here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PE4qraeR9o

If you have a good look at my theory, and most people who criticise it don’t, then you will notice that it took me five years to write, based on personal observations and conclusions, supported by a review of the relevant medical journals etc. It was published in 1980, and some years later I wrote a book about it between 1994 and 2000 which was supported by more than 100 references from a wide range of medical and related literature, including history texts. I sold that book mainly to public and school libraries so that parents and teachers could read it and use the information to prevent health problems in their own children and students. If you then have a good look at my website you can see that I have been referring to all of that information and adding ideas and sources to it since 1992 or 3, or earlier, and it has had a web counter since 2001???.
However, when I started to contribute to a page in Wikipedia about Da Costa’s syndrome I was confronted by two editors who argued that there was nothing in the ‘real’ medical literature to support my own theory and research. They continued to criticise, insult, and delete almost everything that I added from other sources, and every other page that I contributed to on the grounds that I was a fringy kook, and that all of the information was cruft, nonsense and crap from out-of-date and unreliable references.

If you now have a look at the following video you will notice that many of the ideas that I developed from my own observations, and other sources, was reflected by earlier community health educators. For example, the film clip that was produced . . .

under the technical supervision of
Dr. Dorothy B. Nyswander
Professor of Public Health Education
School of Public Health
University of California

You will notice that some of the ideas that I developed were supported or confirmed by that scientific and education ‘authority, such as the cause of poor posture is poor health and poor nutrition in childhood, sleeping in beds that sag like a hammock, and poor choice of shoes which affect the way a person stands. Also, in order to detect poor posture it is necessary to do something that most people never do, and that is to look in the mirror while standing sideways to see the slouch or stoop that you can’t see front on.

My criticism of the Posture video

My criticism of that video is that it uses a common ‘victim blaming‘ argument that I often see, where they say that poor posture is due to bad sitting habits, However, many children grow straight naturally so it is not that simple. In fact, the cause is poor health or nutrition etc, so those factors need to be addressed, and if necessary, the children who slouch need to be given information about how to sit correctly.in order to prevent other health problems from occurring later in life. Also, if children don’t know that they have poor posture, and nobody teaches them about the topic, why would any responsible adult tell them it was due to their bad habit when they are only six years old????? Of course, it would be useful to adopt a good way of sitting, but that isn’t correcting a bad habit. It is solving a postural problem that is caused by other factors, such as a curved spine. The video also refers to the need for exercise to develop the spinal muscles that can hold the body upright, but there are many professional sportsmen who have played sport all their lives, and yet have stoops. Therefore the exercise is not the only factor, and in fact many tall children probably develop a stoop because they constantly have to lean toward a desk at school or to talk to their smaller friends. In other words the development of good posture involves multiple factors that all need to be taken into consideration.

My response to my two critics in wikipedia

I have been adding information to my website since the early 1990’s, and prepared the text for this webpage sometime in the past two years, and I saw the You Tube video on 7th June 2010 when I first noticed it, when it replaced my theory on the first page of the Google search engine rankings for posture. It was possibly made before I was born, and confirms that similar ideas have been a part of ‘real’ scientific and ‘education’, and ‘university standard’ literature, and that people who argue against it are the fools who don’t know what they are talking about, and don’t understand the problems. I have been on the first page of Google posture, and or, in number one position quite often in the past, but Wikipedia was nowhere to be seen until I went there, and after I was banned.

Obviously somebody is paying attention to my contributions, one way or the other, whether they admit it or not.