Use it or lose it — the hazards of bed rest and inactivity
One article on PainSci cites Corcoran 1991: The Trouble with Chairs
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
Professional experience and lay wisdom teach us the benefits of exercise and the hazards of idleness. Yet the myth persists that “bed rest is good for you” when ill or convalescing. Abundant scientific evidence in the past 50 years has demonstrated the specific damage done to each of the body's organ systems by inactivity. Both aging and inactivity lead to strikingly similar kinds of deterioration. I summarize the data from military and veterans' hospitals, rehabilitation experience, aerospace research, and gerontology and review the physiologic and metabolic changes of aging and inactivity, along with strategies to help prevent the iatrogenic complications of bed rest.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- Photobiomodulation therapy is not better than placebo in patients with chronic nonspecific low back pain: a randomised placebo-controlled trial. Guimarães 2021 Pain.
- No effect of creatine monohydrate supplementation on inflammatory and cartilage degradation biomarkers in individuals with knee osteoarthritis. Cornish 2018 Nutr Res.
- The CANBACK trial: a randomised, controlled clinical trial of oral cannabidiol for people presenting to the emergency department with acute low back pain. Bebee 2021 Med J Aust.
- Relationships Between Sleep Quality and Pain-Related Factors for People with Chronic Low Back Pain: Tests of Reciprocal and Time of Day Effects. Gerhart 2017 Ann Behav Med.
- Modulation in the elastic properties of gastrocnemius muscle heads in individuals with plantar fasciitis and its relationship with pain. Zhou 2020 Sci Rep.