Health
Gardening Pain-free from Pursuit Physiotherapy

Follow these basic body mechanics tips for gardening safely!
Gardening season is here! We want you to enjoy the outdoors without injuring yourself. It’s easy to get overzealous and spend hours in the garden without noticing an aching back or neck until it’s too late. But don’t worry, just because you have a long ‘to do’ list doesn’t mean you have to suffer the consequences. By planning ahead and being smart about your body mechanics you can help prevent soreness and injuries.
Follow these easy tips for staying healthy throughout the gardening season:
Lift properly to protect your back.
Remember to bend your knees and engage your core muscles; use your leg muscles to squat and don’t bend with your back.
- Avoid lifting and twisting through your back – instead keep the load close to your body and pivot your feet and trunk together
- Avoid carrying heavy loads on 1 side of your body – balance it out on both sides or lighten up the load and take more trips. Also consider getting help for heavy lifting – you can’t do it all!
Maintain good posture.
Position yourself close to the task at hand to avoid awkward reaching and twisting. Try to keep your back straight and head in a neutral position so that you are not looking up or down for extended periods of time.
- Use stools, chairs, or knee pads whenever possible to help maintain good neck and back posture.
- When pushing a wheelbarrow or lawnmower keep your back tall and head up. Also bend your knees and engage your core muscles to optimize your power and protect your spine.
- Take mini-breaks to stretch and correct your posture – try squeezing your shoulder blades together, or contracting your deep abdominal (TA) muscles.
Use Proper Tools to Reduce Strain
- Use knee pads for kneeling and avoid sustained squatting. This will give your knees, hips, ankles and back a break.
- Use a step stool or tools with extended handles to make overhead work easier. Bring yourself closer to your task to avoid awkward reaching and reduce neck and shoulder strain.
- Use tools with good grips or ergonomic handles to reduce fatigue on your hand and forearm muscles. Ensure they are a comfortable fit for your hand size.
Prevent Repetitive Strain Injuries
Doing the same task over and over will put excessive strain on certain body parts and muscle groups, leading to pain and injury. Here are some self-management tips to help avoid RSI’s:
- Change positions frequently to avoid stiffness and strain on certain body parts. For example try raking on both sides.
- Alternate tasks to add variety to your body movements and avoid static postures or repetitive lifting. For example do 10 minutes of weeding followed by 10 minutes of pruning.
- Take breaks to stretch and hydrate. It is important to give your body some time to recover, and adding these mini-breaks can help improve your work endurance and efficiency.
- Don’t overdo it! Create a realistic plan ahead of time so that you aren’t trying to get all your tasks done in a single day or weekend. Plan to spread your workload out over several days or weeks to avoid overuse injuries.
- Never work through pain. Listen to your body and stop when you are getting tired or sore. The task will still be there the next day or week!
Keep your body limber
- Warm-up before gardening with some light walking or gently swinging your arms and legs. This helps increase your heart rate and gets blood flowing to the muscles so they are ready to work.
- Take stretch breaks. Do some of your favourites and try to target all your major body parts – neck, shoulders, back, and legs. This will keep you feeling loose and flexible and prevent muscle tension from building up. Move slowly and hold each position for approximately 10-15 seconds.
- Cool-down. An easy walk around the yard and some gentle stretching will help relieve tension after your work and prevent muscle stiffness.
We hope these tips help keep you active, healthy, and pain-free throughout the spring and summer. If you have any lingering pain or specific concerns please do not hesitate to book an appointment for a one-on-one session with one of our physiotherapists. We will be able to assess and diagnose your injury, as well as provide hands on treatment and a therapeutic exercise program to address your specific needs.
Click for more information about Pursuit Physiotherapy.
Brownstone Institute
The WHO Cannot Be Saved

From the Brownstone Institute
By
If we were designing a new WHO now, no sane model would base its funding and direction primarily on the interests and advice of those who profit from illness. Rather, these would be based on accurate estimates of localized risks of the big killer diseases. The WHO was once independent of private interests, mostly core-funded, and able to set rational priorities. That WHO is gone.
The WHO was originally intended primarily to transfer capacity to struggling states emerging from colonialism and address their higher burdens of disease but lower administrative and financial capabilities. This prioritized fundamentals like sanitation, good nutrition, and competent health services that had brought long life to people in wealthier countries. Its focus now is more on stocking shelves with manufactured commodities. Its budget, staffing, and remit expand as actual country need and infectious disease mortality decline over the years.
While major gaps in underlying health equality remain, and were recently exacerbated by the WHO’s Covid-19 policies, the world is a very different place from 1948 when it was formed. Rather than acknowledging progress, however, we are told we are simply in an ‘inter-pandemic period,’ and the WHO and its partners should be given ever more responsibility and resources to save us from the next hypothetical outbreak (like Disease-X). Increasingly dependent on ‘specified’ funding from national and private interests heavily invested in profitable biotech fixes rather than the underlying drivers of good health, the WHO looks more and more like other public-private partnerships that channel taxpayer money to the priorities of private industry.
Pandemics happen, but a proven natural one of major impact on life expectancy has not happened since pre-antibiotic era Spanish flu over a hundred years ago. We all understand that better nutrition, sewers, potable water, living conditions, antibiotics, and modern medicines protect us, yet we are told to be ever more fearful of the next outbreak. Covid happened, but it overwhelmingly affected the elderly in Europe and the Americas. Moreover, it looks, as the US government now makes clear, almost certainly a laboratory mistake by the very pandemic industry that is promoting the WHO’s new approach.
Collaborating on health internationally remains popular, as it should be in a heavily interdependent world. It also makes sense to prepare for severe rare events – most of us buy insurance. But we don’t exaggerate flood risk in order to expand the flood insurance industry, as anything we spend is money taken from our other needs.
Public health is no different. If we were designing a new WHO now, no sane model would base its funding and direction primarily on the interests and advice of those who profit from illness. Rather, these would be based on accurate estimates of localized risks of the big killer diseases. The WHO was once independent of private interests, mostly core-funded, and able to set rational priorities. That WHO is gone.
Over the past 80 years, the world has also changed. It makes no sense now to base thousands of health staff in one of the world’s most expensive (and healthiest!) cities, and it makes no sense in a technologically advancing world to keep centralizing control there. The WHO was structured in a time when most mail still went by steamship. It stands increasingly as an anomaly to its mission and to the world in which it works. Would a network of regional bodies tied to their local context not be more responsive and effective than a distant, disconnected, and centralized bureaucracy of thousands?
Amidst the broader turmoil roiling the post-1945 international liberal order, the recent US notice of withdrawal from the WHO presents a unique opportunity to rethink the type of international health institution the world needs, how that should operate, where, for what purpose, and for how long.
What should be the use-by date of an international institution? In the WHO’s case, either health is getting better as countries build capacity and it should be downsizing. Or health is getting worse, in which case the model has failed and we need something more fit for purpose.
The Trump administration’s actions are an opportunity to rebase international health cooperation on widely recognized standards of ethics and human rights. Countries and populations should be back in control, and those seeking profit from illness should have no role in decision-making. The WHO, at nearly 80 years old, comes from a bygone era, and is increasingly estranged from its world. We can do better. Fundamental change in the way we manage international health cooperation will be painful but ultimately healthy.
Health
MAHA report: Chemicals, screens, and shots—what’s really behind the surge in sick kids

MxM News
Quick Hit:
Health Secretary RFK Jr. released a new report Thursday blaming diet, chemicals, inactivity, and overmedication for chronic illnesses now impacting 40% of U.S. children.
Key Details:
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The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission report identified four primary culprits: ultra-processed diets, environmental chemicals, sedentary lifestyles, and overreliance on pharmaceuticals.
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The commission called for renewed scrutiny of vaccine safety, arguing there has been “limited scientific inquiry” into links between immunizations and chronic illness.
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President Trump called the findings “alarming” and pledged to take on entrenched interests: “We will not be silenced or intimidated by corporate lobbyists or special interests.”
"Our children's bodies are being besieged," says @SecKennedy on the new MAHA Report.
"These root cause factors are at the foundation of what's driving the chronic disease crisis — but until today, the government didn't speak about them." pic.twitter.com/dhF9wEUJGg
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 22, 2025
Diving Deeper:
On Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released a long-anticipated report from the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission, outlining what the Trump administration sees as the root causes of the chronic disease epidemic among American children. The commission concluded that roughly 40% of U.S. children now suffer from some form of persistent health issue, including obesity, autism, mental health disorders, and autoimmune diseases.
The report identifies four leading contributors: poor nutrition, chemical exposure, lack of physical activity and time outdoors, and overmedicalization of childhood ailments. One of the most alarming statistics cited is the extent to which children’s diets are now composed of what the commission called “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs), with 70% of a typical child’s diet made up of high-calorie, low-nutrient products that contain additives like artificial dyes, sweeteners, preservatives, and engineered fats.
“Whole foods grown and raised by American farmers must be the cornerstone of our children’s healthcare,” the commission urged. It also criticized government-supported programs like school lunches and food stamps for failing to encourage healthy choices, while noting that countries like Italy and Portugal have far lower consumption of UPFs.
The report also raised red flags about widespread chemical exposure through water, air, household items, and personal products. Items of concern included nonstick cookware, pesticides, cleaning supplies, and even fluoride in the water system. The commission referenced research indicating a 50% increase in microplastics found in human brain tissue between 2016 and 2024. It recommended that the U.S. lead in developing AI tools to monitor and mitigate chemical exposure.
Electromagnetic radiation from devices such as phones and laptops was also flagged as a potential contributor to rising disease rates, alongside a marked drop in physical activity among youth. Data cited from the American Heart Association shows 60% of adolescents aged 12-15 do not meet healthy cardiovascular benchmarks, and the majority of children aged 6-17 do not meet federal exercise guidelines.
The commission also tackled what it called a dangerous trend of overmedicating children without considering environmental or lifestyle factors first. Roughly 20% of U.S. children are on at least one prescription medication, including for ADHD, anxiety, and depression.
The commission specifically called out the American Medical Association’s recent stance on curbing health “disinformation,” arguing that it suppresses legitimate inquiry into vaccine safety and efficacy. It further noted that over half of European countries do not mandate vaccinations for school attendance, unlike all 50 U.S. states.
Trump, who established the MAHA Commission by executive order in February, signaled full support for Kennedy’s findings. “In some cases, it won’t be nice or it won’t be pretty, but we have to do it,” he said. “We will not stop until we defeat the chronic disease epidemic in America.”
Policy recommendations based on the report are expected to be delivered to President Trump by August. Among the initial proposals are expanded surveillance of pediatric prescriptions, creation of a national lifestyle trial program, and a new AI-driven system to detect early signs of chronic illness in children.
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