Gait Problems

Many more people have gait (walking) problems than they realize.  I mean walking is walking; we do it every day without even thinking about it.  But do we do it right?  What weird a question.  Or is it?  Actually the way we walk is very important.

When we walk with fluidity and ease, slightly moving our shoulders and hips, swinging our arms, our body erect, with our eyes on the horizon and not putting any extra weight or disportionate pressure on our joints, we are walking with a correct gait.

We never think about these things.  We have way too many things on our minds to think about how we walk unless it becomes a problem.  Unfortunately it has to become very bad before we realize a problem is upon us.

There are several ways problems can occur.  There can be an injury or a medical condition like a stroke, an illness, or disease that causes us to have to use a walker or a cane for a time.  But the most common is the slow insidious changes that just occur year after year until we say “How did this happen?!”

It starts slowly with us sort of sinking into our hips when we stand, the day is long with too many things to do.  Then we’re in a hurry, it seems everyone is.  We get up from our chair intent on what we have to do and where we have to go and we never take our full height.  Soon our proprioceptive system, which tells us where we are in relationship to what is around us, changes and gives us the feeling that we are as upright as we have always been. In truth we are now bent forward. Now the trouble really starts.  Our stride actually starts to shorten now.

We now are never completely upright but we feel upright because we are always bent like this and our family has seen us this way so they don’t notice the change.  The energy in our walk has slowed and we look older.  But we don’t know why we look older.

When looking in the mirror you’re brushing your teeth, combing your hair, shaving or putting on make-up:  not checking out where you are in space.  Actually it is something we should check out.

As we have a shortened gait we actually diminish the amount of energy we generate and are more tired.  We affect our ability to breathe and compress our organs.  Our entire systemic health is being affected.

Now our balance is compromised.  We are also putting extreme pressure on the discs in our spine and on our shoulders, hips and knees.  Soon we are a wreck.  This is an awful story, so let’s change the ending.

Since our body wants to walk correctly, it will respond very quickly to any changes we make in the right direction.

The ReCAPS System™ addresses this with every patient we see.  It is a part of the evaluation and the treatment.

ReCAPS™ has changed the gait and the ensuing problems for our patients for a long time.  It is important that you realize that these gait problems are not just the problems of someone OLDER than us.  We successfully treated patients in their early teens to patients in their eighties.