You can also check out this episode on Spotify!How often do you think about your skeletal health? Too often, we take mobility, absence of pain, and physicality for granted—that is, until we are sidelined.Whether we’re nursing a torn ACL, an arthritic hip, or an osteoporosis-related fracture, even temporary immobility can alter our physical and mental health. It can threaten our sense of self.Health is about more than the absence of pain or disease; about more than just treating the physical symptoms of a condition. Health is about taking a holistic approach to wellness and recognizing that we are the integrated sum of complex parts. Health is about having awareness of data and the stories we tell ourselves, acceptance over the things we can't control, and agency over our life.In today’s solo podcast, Dr. McBride discusses the importance of caring for our skeleton like we do our cars—taking it to the shop when it breaks down, and providing regular maintenance.She gives three examples—including herself!—of people whose physical injuries force them to reckon with their healthHow do you care for your skeleton? What can an injury teach you about your health? What is the relationship, for you, between mobility and mental health?Join Dr. McBride every Monday for a new episode of Beyond the Prescription. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or at lucymcbride.com/podcast or at https://lucymcbride.Substack.com/listen.Get full access to her free weekly Are You Okay? newsletter at https://lucymcbride.substack.com/welcomePlease be sure to like, rate, review — and enjoy — the show!The full transcript of the show is here! Dr. Lucy McBride: [Intro] Hello and welcome to my home office. I'm Dr. Lucy McBride, and this is Beyond the Prescription. Today. It's just you and me. Every other week this season, I'll talk to you like I do my patients, pulling the curtain back on what it means to be healthy, redefining health as a process of self-awareness, acceptance, and agency.[00:00:28] In clinical practice for over 20 years, I have found that patients generally want the same things—a framework to evaluate their risks, access to the truth and data and tools and actionable information to be healthy mentally and physically. We all want to feel more in control of our health. Here, I'll talk to you about how to be a little more okay tomorrow than you are today. Let's go.[00:00:56] [Episode] Hello, everyone and welcome to my solo podcast. Today we're going to be talking about skeletal health and what happens to our bodies and minds when we are out of commission. Today is the final game of March Madness, and I don't know about you, but I am pretty obsessed with March Madness. I love how it signals the beginning of spring.[00:01:14] I love the friendly competition of all the brackets, and my family's pretty obsessed with the games. I am no basketball aficionado, but I really enjoy looking at the athleticism, the strength, and the grit on the courts. I also can't help but wonder what these guys are gonna look like when they're patients in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, for example, when they've had a lot of overuse injuries and they show up in the doctor's office, perhaps like mine.[00:01:40] I think it's important we acknowledge we each have only one skeleton that drives us through life, and we cannot trade in our skeleton like we can our Honda or our Prius. We can only take care of it the best way we possibly can. We can only do maintenance. And I think it's interesting. Many of us take our cars to the shop to rotate the tires, change the oil, align the axles—more than we take care of our skeletons or take them into the shop.[00:02:06] And by the shop, I mean to a physical therapist or other body. Okay, so why does this matter? Why do we need to think about skeletal health? Why do we need to think about injury prevention and why do we need to treat our skeletons at least as well as we do our cars? The short story is this: our skeletal healt