1
Physiology & Medicine / Re: Could Inclined Bed Therapy (IBT) replace surgery for varicose veins and oedema?
« on: 19/07/2010 05:27:50 »
hey andrew I wanted to post this on your new forum but I just got a message on it that it has been hacked. I've been thinking about IBT and what is exactly conferring the benefits and it really does seem to stem from the fact that sleeping in an inclined bed stabilizes the spine so you can breathe better. Conversely sleeping flat on a soft bed tends to misalign the spine and every time you breathe you incorporate the spine and particulary the lower spine as your body tries to compensate for not being able to get a full lung breath. Also this is a good reason for constantly tossing and turning in bed, it is a poor effort to try to realign the spine properly which allows for full lung breathing to no avail. I would think that the ideal way to sleep would be flat on a hard surface for maximum breathing lung capacity but of course at first our joints would have to adjust for a while to what would feel like discomfort from weakened shoulder and hip joints. I don't have any study on floor sleeping but if you are undergoing a full study then I would hope you will include sleeping on the floor as another control. A drawback to the inclined bed that I haven't heard brought up that I hope you can address is the increased wear on the bed springs from not laying evenly. Are you accounting for this ? I can see how regularly flipping the bed would save the coils but is it possible that once the bed springs have adjusted to the new pressure from the body in incline that the IBT won't be conferring its benefits at least fully ? Which brings me back to sleeping flat on the floor is the discomfort that is experienced at first the price you pay for the long term benefits which the inclined bed tries to offer ?