Ask HN: How best to heal your body?

Just be patient, good luck. Don't break it again in the same way.

Please do not try any X-Ray experiments on yourself, unless you want to neuter yourself!

As regards to dieting go with what your body tells you it wants to eat. As to focus learn a new computer language or contribute code to an open source project.

The best you can probably do now is eat well and rest. I hurt my tendons quite a bit and I know for bones and connective tissue, you can't do much better than rest.

edit: and I hope you feel better. I'm sure we can expect more activity from you now.. or more frequent updates to mibbit :P

"Or at least would give me something to do"

I don't think it will heal so fast that you can actually watch it live ;-)

Patience is indeed key.

I've had several sports related injuries over the years; two things have always caused problems for me:

1. my impatience to get back into the swing of things too soon

2. not listening to the physiotherapist/doctor/rehab personnel

The above two points combined together caused me to start doing activities that I shouldn't be doing far too soon after the injury and not do enough of the (prescribed) activities that I should have been doing for long enough after the injury.

While I'm now mobile, I can't do many of my favorite sports/activities anymore - hindsight is 20/20, naturally.

I just wish I'd been more patient, receptive to advice and persistent. Live and learn.

I have had 2 major neck operations due to 3 fractured vertebrae so...

Listen to your doctors and your physical therapists. I did lots of fiction reading and exercised like hell when I was allowed / needed to. Eat healthy, like you normally would even without a fractured hip (although your doctors probably recommended supplements). Do activities that bring a smile to your face.

Bottom line: let your body heal naturally, don't worry too much and as most of the comments here have said, be patient.

You can learn a lot about your body while your recovering. This will help you understand the objective of the physical therapy exercises that you'll be doing when your injury has healed to that point. Also you'll understand how better balance and just being in better shape can stop you from getting re-injured.

There are also strength coaches who can give you specific rehabilitative exercises that your therapist might not know about. If you read the work done by Mike Boyle and Mike Robertson, you'll get an idea. You could even email them and ask what all you could do to fix your hip faster.

I bought a few anatomy books and listened to a lot of different lectures on the knee till I realised that glue+hamstring strength decreases the pressure on the patella tendon (which I had torn). And then I created my own exercises till I'm pretty much healed now.

Its a long process but I feel that the appreciation you get for fitness from this will help you for the rest of your life.

Since physical health directly relates to our performance as well as well being, I don't see this topic as at all off-topic.

From another perspective, many people "hack" their health. It seems a worthy topic.

No.

Probably almost nothing you can do can make you heal faster. You can make it heal slower, however, pretty easily (say, by breaking it again!) but it's hard to beat millions of years of evolution with only a few hundred years of medical science.

Good lord, that sounds painful. Hopefully you have a rapid recovery.

Your doctor is probably the best source of information regarding exercise.

As far as your diet is concerned, you should just focus on eating as healthily as you can. Your body is going to heal itself at it's own pace; assuming your normal state is not one of malnourishment, you should be planning for what happens towards the end of your healing process. By that, I mean you're going to be largely immobilized (I assume) from this injury, so the best you can really do for yourself is to try to keep your overall health up in a general sense.

I wouldn't focus on calcium rich diets versus a balanced diet - a balanced diet is almost always better, and then you don't end up with follow-on side effects of drastic diet.

Beyond that, all I can recommend is you follow the advice of your physical therapist. They make not sound logical, but they're good at what they do.

If you are going to be mostly immobilized the most likely potential problem is gaining weight. Be very careful not to eat more than you need (be especially careful about snacking from boredom). I speak from experience when I say not gaining weight in the first place is a LOT easier than losing it later.

Not sure what your eating habits are but I went from 140 => 200 pounds when I spent a year mostly in bed (my eating habits were not too healthy to begin with).

Make sure your activity/eating ratio is adjusted as necessary.

In 2007 I was involved in a major automobile accident. I fractured my neck at C6-C7 and completely shattered my right leg just above the ankle. I broke both bones completely, resulting in having a rod and screws implanted in the bone.

It was 12 weeks with the neck brace on, and 14 weeks before I could walk unassisted with a cane. Full healing and recovery took even longer then that.

The first thing you need to realize is that you don't have to hack your body - based on your tech details the doctors have already done that for you. Welcome to the bionic club! The practice of medicine in general is akin to hacking - it either helps the body do something better, or coaxes it into doing something it wouldn't otherwise do.

Your diet should be as normal and healthy as it can be. You don't need to do anything special. If something was out of whack that you needed, it would probably be detected by now. I was low on potassium and sodium after my emergency surgery and they wouldn't let me leave until it was corrected. FYI - IV potassium burns :).

Your physical therapist can assist you with exercise. In general they'll want you to do a variety of things in the office and give you some exercises for daily homework. Do them! Your therapist should be able to put together some appropriate exercises if you want to go beyond the basics.

The most important thing for you right now is to be extremely comfortable with your doctors and physical therapist. You need to be able to tell them everything and anything without fear or embarrassment. Sometimes the best test a doctor can do is to ask what you are feeling, and pushing through the pain in PT doesn't make you a hero. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Be careful with painkillers. They are important, but they can be addictive. It might not be a bad idea to have someone keep an eye on the bottle and make sure you stay within the prescribed limits.

I'm not sure what devices you could use to watch yourself heal, but you can probably get your X-Rays and other test images on CD when they are taken. I've even got a bunch of physical X-Ray, CT and MRI films.

To help heal my leg, which broke in a spot at great risk for nonunion, they put me on an ultrasound bone healer. Nifty little gadget - I still have it!

http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/25/portable-bone-healing-sys...