Muscular Pain

Muscles have become the reference points for our welfare. An exquisit muscle care is necessary  to cope with the burdens of our bipedal condition, a condition that we don’t seem to be adapting to, despite the 5 million years that we have been standing erect.

Our muscles have bad press. Apparently, they are delicate: they are overloaded, distended,  they contracture, atrophy, cool and tear easily. Before using them, we must warm up and stretch if we want to avoid bad surprises and a massage is necessary to activate the circulation and remove those toxins accumulated with the effort. It is not understood how we have been able to overcome the exigent evolving conditions before our actual civilization with such deplorable muscles.


The human muscle-skeletal system, if we listen to the gossip, might be the biggest botched job of Evolution. Our brains are big and we have great intelligence but that’s useless, because our plans are coming down because of some bones, joints and, especially, muscles that can’t carry the burden of our purposes.


Each cell system has a set of sensors of damage that draws limits on the conditions it can handle. Muscles require the following to do their job: plenty of oxygen, no sudden and surprising stretches and not exceeding a specific time of sustained contraction. If you violate these conditions, the necrotic damage sensors will activate and send distress signals to the brain causing it to activate the pain program, forcing the individual to suspend the action. If he or she obeys, pain goes away, if irreparable damage has not yet occurred. The pain of angina pectoris shows the patient the limit of his or her effort ("don’t go too far with this...") and pain of a heart attack points out cell death ("you’ve gone too far...").


Under conditions of proper oxygenation and manageable load, the necrotic muscular damage sensors remain silent and therefore there is no pain. However, many men and, indeed, women feel their muscles sore, unmotivated and tired without having made any effort previously.


Chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, neck pain ... they generate a belief that muscles are not fine. However, there’s no evidence that the muscle is causing the problem.


Little is known about muscle pain. We still don’t understand the mechanism of stiff muscles, myofascial pain or contractures. We blame the muscles with no evidence and condemn them to hard work in the gym, swimming and boring relaxation sessions.


There is a small detail that, from my perspective as a neurologist, has always disconcerted me about this: the muscle is submitted since the first neurons of the embryo appear at the orders of the nervous system. Muscle fibers shrink only (usually) if the various neural centers that program actions demand it. The logical thing is to analyze these orders, not who does them by obedience.


If we assume that the muscles are not made to make lots of effort, it does not make sense that the brain wants them to work and, indeed, that's what happens: the brain activates the pain and exhaustion so the individual stops moving. The brain protects muscles from the individual’s desire of moving them.


Then... which one is right? The muscles are well and, therefore, they can and must work or are they defective and the brain has to protect them?


Everything suggests that the muscles can and should work, and that the one that is not working is the brain: it erroneously assumes that the muscles are defective and protects them unnecessarily.


In all this matter of widespread pain, the poor muscle takes the blame while the real culprit, the brain, just locks it in a dungeon for no reason.


Muscles are innocent. The boss, the brain, goes around doing whatever it wants and no one seems to want to incriminate him.


Incomprehensibly, citizens with imprisoned muscles do not want to hear about this innocence. They want their muscles to remain submitted to the brain, which apparently is not guilty...

Abs, memory... and SSRIs

We are a mobile species. Our survival depended (before the implementation of agriculture-livestock) on our mobility, walking around looking for a shelter, sustenance and company. Mindless mobility would only be used to waste energy or take unnecessary risks. 

Therefore, us mobile species have an extensive neural network whose mission is to select smart decisions, those which optimize cost-effectiveness.

We need muscles and neurons: strength and memory, gyms and memory workshops, weights and crosswords.

I studied piano in my town with the band director. I received lessons at noon, when the teacher had just woken up. He used to listen to me from his bed or the bathroom, and from time to time, would yell at me to correct: “F sharp!!” He rarely observed or corrected my piano "technique”. I learned how to play by what God or the devil gave me. For me, playing the piano was a muscular issue, I had to take strength in the fingers and design systems of gums to exercise the flexors, which I thought were responsible for lowering the keys.

Around the same time came the "Friars School”, where pedagogy focused on memorizing each and every one of the texts as fast and accurately as possible. Interestingly, the piano teacher flatly forbade me to learn the songs by memory and I had to keep my eyes fixed on the sheet.

I exercised my finger flexors and memorized lists of rivers and Visigoth kings but could not retain any music sheet. The lists are missing now, the flexors have recovered its normal and desirable volume, and when I play the piano I have to make up the notes.

We are in the age of fitness, of muscular and neuronal crush, of obsession to highlight the abdomen muscles and the brain (although not visible). We need abs to do more sit-ups, like Cristiano Ronaldo, and solve puzzles to solve more difficult ones. The intent, meaning and complexity of the task don’t matter. 

Reductionism is raging: to have a good response capacity, we need shaped abdomen muscles and an incredible memory capacity. Gym and memory workshop.

A laboratory mouse in a cage with no gym and no stimuli is left without hippocampal neurogenesis (generation of new neurons in the hippocampus: an essential brain area to deal with the new). If we make the mouse exercise, making him spin eternally in that absurd wheel, the hippocampus renews its production of new neurons. If there is no muscle or newness to remember, we discourage, apparently because our serotonin goes down.

We don’t need to worry if serotonin wanes. We can improve its availability by preventing the neuron that released it from swallowing it back without even letting it take its time to make effect: we can block the "reuptake" (an absurd gesture of evolution with no apparent purpose) so it becomes instantly solved. The Serotonin-Specific Reuptake Inhibitors, the SSRIs, complete a survival kit for these turbulent times:

Abs and puzzles and SSRIs just in case.

- Doctor, could you give me something to forget about all this? Lately I haven’t been able to forget anything. With today's advances...

- Sorry, but we have nothing to improve your forgetfulness.