Osteoporosis mischaracterisations

di Maximilien Girardin

Let us reason, instead of just run blindly behind linear fantasized twisted fallacies, on a straight road but on the wrong track, in my opinion….

Thus the top slide is a hoax in my mind….that most swallow without even stopping a second to reason over it…because like in every good hoax:

• not all is false, there are a few well placed obvious and
• half simplified truths that make the whole more palatable and thus believable and
• as such succeeds in launching the parade in which most march along.
• But as in scorpions the venom is in the tail and
• its stinger is tiny but that is exactly why we should heed it.

Bone is basically a connective tissue, not that different from the rest.

Ok, there are a few differences … but let us start from the beginning and then see where we arrive.

First of all, bone is a connective tissue from a histological point of view, meaning:

It consists basically of four components if you start to split it up into its components and analyze the parts as academia or hijacked science likes to do:

1. water
2. matrix
3. cells
4. fibers

The hierarchy and chronology in living bone, though is a bit of a brain-twister, because there are a few time -windows or -frames to take in consideration, and that makes the story a bit more complex, as we see further on, but usually people that take the time to read my stuff and torture themselves with it, should be accustomed to that chaotic handicap of mine now… By the contextual questions and very specific reactions or personal messages I know a few of you really do this… reading through it…thus if you get lost along the road just start over from the beginning and try again, it is actually not that difficult but rather obvious…the basic misguiding problems usually are two fold:

• the frame of reference used and its consequences the idea’s or images that education and human culture brainwashed and force-feed to you, having the effect that most of us can only recognize what we know...
• programming fallacy that makes it very difficult to observe something we are facing with a clean slate or really fundamentally rethink something over from a completely new perspective. ( see the Fake news is there something else? article) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/fake-news-something-else-max-girardin/?

Prejudice is an extremely strong and potent Homo Sapiens habit, and Homo Sapiens like any mammal, is a creature of habits, nothing so difficult as to change habits.

Don’t worry it is ok, it takes years of systematic de-programming, de-culturizing and active de-education-ing…and active it is: hard work blood sweat and tears and discipline, never thought that being a philosophical Punk took so much discipline

People from the Punk generation get that…sometimes.

Back to our hot potato. Hierarchy and chronology in this case are tricky because when looking at principles its a beautiful story of continuity, but our brain has trouble seeing just the principles in action behind the scene and not the show playing on the curtain in front of our eyes like a motion picture… Thus let’s try to peek behind the curtain and see Nature’s principles at work.

I am not going to do the story of the connective tissue again, if you want that beginning of the story read: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/popular-demand-fascia-max-girardin/

Thus we catch the horse on the run by the mane and jump up Cossack style like Taras Bulba… The connective tissue is there, it already took its form by means of self organization, we are still in the embryology window but the connective tissue, like the good inner tissue it is, fills all the empty spaces (actually never empty it just worms its way through following the way of least resistance) in between the frontier tissue systems. The inner tissue is the green stuff in the middle disc, the frontier tissue is also the red tube, the light blue tube which is just a complex tube of skin that is very touchy and is going its own way, and the dark blue one that covers the outside. Just picture the central disc on the picture and we’ll take it from there.

The whole thing grows in different directions at different speeds, and as the whole is one organism and demonstrates quite serious “stickyness” all over, it changes shape and folds, twists and turns according to this simple principle: the one growing fast runs away from the rest if they can’t follow the speed of growth (motor or actor, the one doing the fast growth for the moment in an extreme simplified version), but the other ones who sticks to it can’t follow because they don’t have the ability to grow that fast thus they behave as a restraining apparatus (extremely simplified they are the steering system as well as the brakes). I like a lot the image of a Jokari game as living picture for that one:

The motor or growth is the guy hitting the Jokari ball with a swing of his racket, thus the ball flies away…but it does not end in the pond you see beyond the parking lot, because as it ‘grows’ away fast it tends to stretch the elastic cord sticking to it and that goes along as it can but at some point it starts to give a direction, often a curve to the ball and brakes it more and more to a point where it brings the ball back to the player but not in the line he shot it away. The elastic cord is the connective tissue or green stuff, it is the restraining apparatus, it brakes a bit and by that steers the whole ball and cord, gives it a direction (hence steering system) and at some point slows the growth so much that it looks like the whole growth process comes to a stand still. (Lucky for the embryos and mothers they don’t come flying back like the Jokari ball, pregnancy and development would be a funny game and we would end up with serious changed forms…)

A contrario of the Jokari elastic cord our green stuff does grow but simply said at a different rate, which is shown in developmental movies of embryos as if the whole process goes in fits and starts, almost wave like and with changes of direction. That is basically what it does if you take the big time frame. (See the Youtube movie below) Of course when the green stuff has caught up the fast growing ball goes again but in a different direction now.

So what happens in the green stuff in which our bones will form at some point?

We have all four components in place:

1. water
2. matrix
3. cells
4. fibers

But one thing is for sure, CELLS HATE TO BE STRETCHED OR TUGGED OR PUSHED!!!!

The cells in the green stuff are called by a nice scientifically complicated name: undifferentiated mesenchymal cells. (Mesenchyme is the name for baby or toddler connective tissue) while undifferentiated means they are not basic stem cells anymore ( the kind that in theory, given the right conditions can transform in any kind of tissue) but still have quite a lot of possibility to adapt, they can shift their form (transform or differentiate) in almost all types of cells we find in most connective tissues (extremely simplified version) and like toddlers they are extremely sensitive to their environment. And now we have the first prodigy, if you disturb them too much by tugging on them, they replicate. One of the two daughter cells stays a toddler while its sibling transforms into something different and better adapted to the conditions. As such we have a strange scenario unfolding in the green stuff:

• First of all by this process we retain toddler cells in our connective tissue practically forever (comes in handy for repair and maintenance after trauma or strain)
• Secondly our tissue can adapt to the local circumstances practically forever
• Thirdly our green tissue is going to take many shapes and forms

This process is called the mesengenic process:

Courtesy of Front. Immunol., 04 September 2013 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2013.00201

This image is nice but very incomplete, the green stuff will not just FORM your: teeth, bone, cartilage, muscle, bone marrow, fascias, ligaments, dura mater, tendons, fat storing cells and adipocytes but also pleura, pericardium, peritoneum and the endothelium of blood vessel walls…

And here we get to the troubles in paradise if you can’t see in principles; the hierarchy of the connective tissue, our green stuff is water + solute in it (matrix) which are the fundamental basis for the cells, their genesis and maintenance.

When the cells are added to the mix they can produce, if stressed properly, the fibers or at least the precursors, so it is logical that the fibers come last in the hierarchy & chronology, and the matrix upfront before the cells. And that goes up magnificently until bone and teeth as we’ll see.

Zoom out to the whole embryo as an organism: what do we see?

The Jokari game is going on hard all of the time, so the poor mesenchymal cells that are in the line of fire or I should say line of tug or stress are going to do what they can: shifting shapes and change by their behavior their environment.

Look at this animation; the wave like pattern of growth between the visceral and neuro spine systems and how it deforms the whole…Imagine the forces at play on the green stuff.

To simplify to the extreme to stay comprehensible let’s look only at the matrix and cells

I don’t wanna overshoot as I did probably in the article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/edge-chaos-its-dynamics-why-biodiversity-really-matters-max-girardin/ in my opinion the best principle article I ever put on paper, but not very successful in reads, so I GUESS OVERKILL, let us not do that again…

Erase for a minute all the mis-conceptions and very probably fallacies or hoaxes you have learned about anatomy during your education….try to look at this story with unprejudiced child’s eyes, here we go.

So the poor green stuff’s cells get tugged and stretched – strained- stressed – even compressed at some points; and that in different parts with different directions and its cells answer the call or they go all “Last Post” which in cell language is called differentiation or specialization.

Have a look on YouTube on this guy’s version of the Last Post it is very impressive

Thus depending on the cell’s positional relationship with the environment, and what the environment is doing to them, they react accordingly, but not just that. Even the matrix reacts under the influence of the cells but not solely. There are also thixotropy effects at work and electrical charges, even piëzo-electrical effect, actually they do it all together (it is a WHOLE!!!!) and as the cells shape shift they get other names…but it is an egg or chicken question…( Bloody linear thinking in something which is not linear)

So the hierarchy & chronology looks a bit twisted here….but …Personally I still think that chickens is one of the ways the egg found to reproduce itself but that is another story…( eggs are with us since cartilaginous fish (sharks), reptiles even the dino’s did the egg thing and there were no chickens around yet….Savvy?)

Anyway “Imagine” as John Lennon sang so well, no don’t imagine … SEE there are two huge fundamental Nature’s principles or tendencies at play here (very simplified but doable)

If we take the Matrix and Cells as one package doing their thing we get a series of very different density responses to the strains…. Let’s for the sake of oversight and simplicity call it two major urges or forces at work, and for the general love of linearity even put them on an axis or even better a vector:

Natural physiological trend towardsmaximal permeability (edge of chaos)

under the motto ‘please, please let me exchange quickly and thoroughly

blood marrow vessel peritoneum pleura fat fascia muscle ligament cartilage bone

Tendency under mechanical strain to densify the environment

More density (order):

more fibers – make the matrix cartilagenous – not enough fill it with Calcium phosphates and make solid bone of it, even tooth if necessary

When you look at the tissue-organs put in a row in between the blue arrows, they look all very different anatomy wise, I just put them from left to right as: from extremely permeable and soft towards more dense and finally hard

If you print this out and draw vertical lines through each tissue organ from arrow to arrow, you get a vision of how during their development they are just the expression of the two forces in that particular anatomical topographic zone…if you understand your embryology

Would it be possible to see even briefly that all the complicated things, even hoaxes we learned in anatomy and histology maybe, tortured our brains to remember in barbarous sounding names from the Greeks and Romans that practically no one of us spoke naturally as a student, are just one tissue! That is a damned SHAPE SHIFTER by obligation, EACH and every one is green stuff that “represents the local positonal compromise between two major tendencies at work on it”, tending naturally towards permeability while the strain pushes it towards order or densification!!!! (Not quoting anyone but my mind and Nature dear Barbara) And that game never stops it is very much alive as long as we maintain our FORM

If you don’t believe me or your brain, read a bit about what happens with the green stuff in space… major health issues like loss of bone density, loss of bone mass, loss of cartilage density, loss of cartilage the worse in the hyaline (which is already a vey fluidic one), loosening up of fascia, loosening up tendons, ligaments, dramatic loss of muscle mass….Yeah right don’t believe a Congolese Belgian ask any astronaut, cosmonaut or space medicine guy or space biologist and look at the drawing again and reason…..

This picture comes from Scientific American they made several articles about how the body and its tissues shift in space.

Form as structure and behavior as one, suddenly gets another dimension.

If by weightlessness you reduce the lower arrow or force, dramatically the above one starts going its own way (as Fleetwood Mac would sing) and everyone in the green stuff starts to readapt or like Pink sings “Get the Party started” or like Alanis Morissette “You rock my world” and the green stuff starts shape shifting again…little undifferentiated mesenchymal cells do their natural thing.

If the comprehension of this and most of all its consequences, starts to dawn and it pisses you off, welcome to my posse!!!! Savvy? Hahaha…this one is for you Barbara!

You asked: “but other than if you were press ganged into the astronaut corps (which usually has more than enough volunteers, I’m told) why would you as an Osteopath care? ” Because dear that is one of the main things we work with! If mechanical stress in whatever dimension changes tissue – system – organ the green stuff will react accordingly… (these three points are my way of saying stop and think don’t read on without reasoning) and the tissue (green stuff) will react as it can adapt a little its texture – organize an inflammation and accordingly change its texture a lot or even shift in its density dramatically like a heel spur or calcification (osteophyte) or supraspinatus calcification in the middle of the tendon… think principles and then observe what happens in nature… All we do is try to keep the green stuff for having to do just that…How? Try to normalize the stresses locally and generally. (Also the fluids going )

Classic image of a posse

But that is just a start it gets worse….”Isn’t it Ironic?” Our Canadian Alanis Morissette would ask singing.

Ok fast forward, embryo, toddler, child, adolescent, adult, parent, growing old, meno- or peno- pause…and bang the fear of Osteoporosis kicks in.

Our incredible solid bones on which we relied and did everything with our whole life are in danger of betraying us badly; extra calcium in tablets, hormone therapy, vitamine D, movement but not too much so they don’t break, drinking milk again and eating more cheese for the extra calcium, are some of the suggestions, the image below is just one of the thousands you find on the net…sold as facts….oxymoron talk taken for fact?

Remember it is the matrix that feeds the cells, who if they are stressed produce fibers, but if that does not do it, the cells transform in osteoblasts and start to spit calcium-phosphates and mineralize the matrix, making bone, or odontoblasts making tooth.

Thus in reality bone is as supple as a rubber bludgeon like the police or M.P.’s used to have, but it is rigid because in the matrix Ca-P ‘s were pumped in.

Wow I see your shock from here, take a good advice of a Punk or contrarian, don’t believe me test it out by yourself:

Buy a fresh bone at the butchers or from a hunter (FRESH NOT COOKED!) put it in a container with EDTA or even vinegar, submerged, after a day or so the fluid has turned to a milky substance, empty it and fill it again with fresh EDTA or vinegar, and keep repeating the process until all the minerals are extracted: the fluid does not change color anymore.

The bone looks exactly the same, it just changes color from white to something beige, but size and shape stay identical: now bend it and you’ll see you have a nice rubber bone you can twist and bend even bludgeon something with.

Now you see what I mean; we can start to reason:

Ok so real bone is the dry hard stuff you’ve known all your life and handled in your anatomy lessons, and at the same time the rubber bludgeon inside it as one, savvy?

Reason

The mineral one is rigid and gives support, almost easily comparable to a porcelain or china coffee cup or ashtray, it actually withstands weight perfectly but if you throw it against the wall or give it a sudden shock? Yes it breaks or shatters….

Whereas the rubber one…if you put force on it or even traction, it bends and twists, deforms elastically but does not break, try throwing it against the wall and you’ll finish with a tendinitis or throwers arm before even scratching it….

So what is the problem with osteoporosis genesis? A lack of solid calcium or elastic fibers-matrix? What makes the bones brittle and break with the slightest shock or fall?

Big GULPS….swallow … calm down and breathe…. think again and don’t get angry….bad for blood-pressure and heart…

Everyone heard at some point or knows that heavy or long Cortisone treatments may provoke osteoporosis yes?

Search what cortisone does with the calcium of bones?

Ok stop searching the answer is nothing… it kills osteocytes (bone cells) but most of all it stimulates hepatic neoglucogenesis BIG TIME!!!!

WHAT? It orders the liver cells to transform the incoming amino-acids into sugars (desamination) …

What are the elastic matrix and fibers in the connective tissue also bones mainly built of…Proteins assembled by amino-acids…and this turn over or construction goes on 24/24 – 7/7…..

Start to get my point?

So have a look at histology and physiology again with a contrarian look and see what comes out of it…. Recent research corroborates this line of thought by the way…..Finally if I may be so bold.

Osteoporosis is more a fibers matrix thing and the calcium aspect is actually a consequence….in many cases

Cheers

Max from the plains of Halle

Post scriptum

I got a set of interesting questions from someone dear to me, who does her best to correct my pidgin Belgian English: “why this article? For patients? For baby osteopaths? For Professionals? And what does EVOST offers? “

Why this article?

Because I really think a bit more questioning, reasoning and consciousness leading to maybe more awareness is something everybody, in all type of cultures and societies can have more of hence my acute injections; and certainly in these mediated trendy ‘lets all run along in the parade’ times. So it is just a trigger for questioning and reflection, and maybe by that way deepening, whatever the subject or topic is.

For patients?

Also because a lot of them are some of the people filling the parades, often like a herd in a stampede. In nature mammals stop drinking milk when their teeth permit them to start feeding on solid food. And as Janek so rightly said, where do the cows get their calcium from? Reason. And although calcium is an important mineral for all mammals, it is not always nor just what trends promote it for… From that quote I suspect Janek of being a Brother.

For Baby osteopaths?

Also they are not different from anyone else, although…They are just freshly brainwashed by an educational business and its teachers, who too often to be acceptable, sell much more their own ego, than trying to bring the baby osteopaths to reason and dig by themselves and reason again, and worse, if possible, they do not stimulate them enough to read the original thoughts as a philosophical invitation but enlighten their own courses with a few, often incorrect, quotes from Still.

I always start my courses, and those are not baby osteopaths, but professionals, by saying: “Do not believe a word of what I say, check, ask, reflect, do the digging by yourselves (that is the only thing that becomes real, your own experience, anyway) and reason, then we can come to exchange and not ‘ex cathedra’ one way direction parroting. “(That is actually what EVOST brings)

For professionals?

Yes also, some are diggers and feel very alone or isolated it is a “buckle up, Thou are not alone Brother”kind of message, and some are ready to question and dig but need just that little extra push to get going, the rest I don’t really care, there are my brother humans but not of my world.

What does EVOST offers?

That is tough one, you should ask someone else doing the EVOST program like Richard Douglas from Daktylus, the author of the “Wonky teeth” article. Write him and ask, I respect his opinion grandly, even if he says I am an old pipe smoking foolish dinosaur. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nine-year-old-boy-wonky-teeth-max-girardin/

For another Spanish student Ignacio, who is busy digging hard I said this: “This is why I used the analogy with the People of the road (Gypsies -Tinkers) on the road they seem to be alone, but in reality in Europe alone they are hundreds of thousands, and they recognize each other at first sight, but on the road they are diluted in the mass of the population living in their boxes. With the diggers it is ‘kif kif’ the same, in our heads we are like the Tinkers – Gypsies or People of the road, we have our eyes on Nature, Form and Life and never reach the horizon, that is why we keep going… it is our burden and our force. Reasoning and questioning has a liberating consequence, it is a burden, sometimes even a torture but it is even-so an empowerment, it makes us who we are, often from steppewolves or outliers to something more profoundly human. I encounter my Brothers all over the planet, and when I SEE them, I recognize them, and they are Brothers in all meanings of the word, whatever the culture or color or profession or age, I SEE them and recognize them. Maybe this is the answer: don’t look at any of my articles, SEE them all as one and maybe you pickup the scent of the spoor (south African for track) of what EVOST is.

It is actually funny I was asked 7 times to join the “Free Masonry” as Still and answered every time with a Groucho Marx quote: “I could never be member of a club, who wants me as a member” My Brotherhood is too large to put in a box, that is why the EVOST Fellowship has no structure just a behavior…

I formulated it as: Someone asked me what is Morphologicum, it is a website: a philosophical platform for people interested in FORM and specially the human form in all its aspects and dimensions, hierarchy and chronology included meaning also history and Nature…The center piece means Macroscopy microscopy and submicroscopy, the satellite symbols are the specific symbols of certain courses, as EVOST and its fellowship among others … but this is shortcoming on the reality as usually when we put thoughts in words written down. address: www.morphologicum.org