The humiliating micro injuries of aging (but not just aging)
- Woke up and stretched too strongly.
- Hopped a little to reach a high shelf.
- Jogged a half block to try to catch a bus (pulled a hamstring, still missed the bus).
- Sneezed while head turned! ⚠️
- Looked up at something on the ceiling for a few seconds too long. (Yep, it was a 🕷.)
For sure this kind of crap is an aging thing, and most people over the age of 50 know all about it.
But it’s also something that every fibromyalgia patient knows, whether they are 20 or 60. Anyone with Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, at any age, can tell you similar stories. A little cervical myelopathy (spinal cord irritation) will do this too! Many autoimmune diseases make people “injury prone,” often for years before diagnosis. And so on, and on, and on…
The full list of conditions that can make you “injury prone” and hurty is disturbingly long. There are more paths to pain than anyone can ever even hear about, let alone reliably diagnose.
And then there’s also a weird grey zone between/overlapping disease and age: aging prematurely due to overall poor fitness, lousy diet, and other stressors, probably mostly via the fascinating mechanism of “inflammaging.” See Chronic, Subtle, Systemic Inflammation. I feel a Venn diagram coming on…
