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Posted 07/19/2011

As the “new guy” here at the Hruska Clinic I am not used to this blogging thing but hope to get accustomed to it.  As you may or may not know I recently started here at the Hruska Clinic after working for the last 9 years for a hospital based clinic in Minot, ND which is my wife’s home town.  The last month or 6 weeks has pretty much consisted of preparing and packing to move, moving, and unpacking once we got here.  My family and I are enjoying the new experiences, and heat, that Lincoln has to offer.  If you follow the news much you may have heard of the devastating flooding that hit our old town of Minot over the last month or two.  This devastation only made our move more stressful as we left family and friends behind in the midst of the worst natural disaster that the area has ever dealt with.  12,000 of the almost 40,000 residents of the city were evacuated due to the flooding.  4100 homes had some water in them with upwards of 3000 having at least 5 feet on the main floor and several hundred with water above the roof line.
This weekend as we continued to do all those little projects that come with moving into a new house, like staining a deck and building a swing-set for our boys, we were able to see some pictures, via Facebook, of the devastation in Minot as the water has now receded enough to let the residents back into their neighborhoods and assess their homes.  After being under water for nearly 3 weeks the amount of damage done is truly devastating and the pictures I know do not do it justice.  Many homes including my mother and father-in-laws house were either moved off of their foundation or had the foundation cave in.  These houses are now unsafe for living in and most likely will need to be demolished and destroyed.  The power of water and mother-nature is truly amazing. 
As I looked at pictures of these homes off their foundations, tilted, twisted, and caving in, and felt for the owners of them knowing that they may never be able to be restored, the PT in me could not keep from thinking about how our bodies are fighting that same stress all the time.  We utilize the analogy of our pelvis being the foundation for our spine a lot here.  We all put repetitive, asymmetrical, stress and strain on our pelvis with the asymmetrical demands of life and our tendencies to stand more on our right leg and reach more with our right arm, twisting our spine more to the left than to the right.  This is caving in the foundation for the rest of our body.  Our house, aka our thorax, is tilting, twisting and caving in just like those houses that need to be demolished in Minot.  We therefore cannot breathe well.  Our arms, like the decks on those houses than now sit at 45 degree angles from the ground, cannot work the way they should.  Our necks and heads, like the chimneys on those houses, are tilted and starting to fall over. 
What a dire picture I paint.  The good news is that unlike those houses that will probably be destroyed, we can restore our foundations and untwist our houses.  With the power of a left hamstring, a left adductor and a properly opposed left diaphragm we can rebuild our houses and straighten out chimneys and decks and make our houses happy and livable again.  It’s also a lot less messy.  Please keep the residents of Minot and other flooded areas in your thoughts and if you need help with your foundation or contact us here at the Hruska Clinic.

Posted July 19, 2011 at 8:31am by Torin Berge.
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