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Regularly using your body helps but IMO it's not clean-cut; your comment is ambiguous enough that I'm going to elaborate.
I'm pushing 40 and still have chronic ~inexplicable back pain since my teens. I'm not a paragon of effort, but I'm not a slug either. I run a 5K every second day (for more than 4 years now!), alongside a variety of physical activities (think pilates, modern dance, HIIT, etc; Covid's response disrupted but didn't completely stop 'em). Sure, I could probably do more, but I could also do an awful lot less, so I claim I'm a relevant data point.
These help manage the pain, but it isn't as rosy a picture as your comment paints.
Physical activity is definitely a tool more people should try and should try more of with a plethora of benefits (mood! confidence! sunlight-if-you-do-it-outside! etc). However, I can read your comments as saying "if only the people with bad-brains-pain would move more, it'd go away". It sadly isn't universal or a fix; I'm living proof.
("ahah!", I imagine that you say, "I didn't mention chronic back pain, just chronic lyme; back pain is different!" Well, maybe. I dunno. I can't tell. Probably? Maybe that's the deal; 80%+ of chronic lyme is bad-brains, while only 25-75% of back pain is bad-brains and the remainder is the back pain of the gaps? Who knows!)
("that back situation sounds like it sucks, man; sorry", I go on to imagine from you, because that's the kind of forum this is going to be ;) )
I agree with your points actually, although not a fan of the pessimism about the sites future. Personally I believe many long time lurkers, like myself, will become posters now that the gaze of AEO is gone. I certainly hope the quality of comments and discourse remains around the same level, and I'm now galvanized to help achieve that.
You're right that I painted a far too rosy picture, I need practice anticipating arguments and I also need to think through this idea. I only became convinced recently and I'm still willing to toss it out if I find strong evidence against it. Part of why I'm posting it here.
My argument is more that a significant portion of chronic pain could be cured by incorporating this idea into treatment. To be clear, I know for a fact that many chronic pain illnesses have concrete causes, and are unfortunately much harder to fix.
Say there is a line between treatment styles of 'think your way out of the pain,' vs. 'all pain is caused by concrete factors that we know, and your mental attitude has no bearing'. Right now I think the line has move too far in favor of the latter, and we need to take a more diverse approach when treating chronic pain.
This will become increasingly relevant as more and more activity takes place on a computer, and we inevitably become even more sedentary than we are now. Figuring out the issue now could prevent a whole host of problems from cropping up in the future.
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