Claude Gordon Brass Camp 1992 - Larry Miller on Health, Fitness, and Physiology

physiology at a brass camp and the answer is that really everything that we
do is physiologic. Whether we understand it or not, processes are taking place in
our bodies all the time that make us function. Our cognitive or mental thought
processes probably are biochemically controlled. There are chemical reactions
taking place in your brain with emotion so that the scientific basis for
cognitive understanding is well formed and it has to do with the fact that
everything in the universe follows physiologic and scientific laws or rules
and those can be applied to our everyday life and what we want to talk to you
about in this lecture then is how do we make the body best work to play our
brass instruments most effectively?
If we apply these scientific principles to the arts, whether it be brass playing
or other arts, we're able to reach higher peaks and use our technical abilities to
express emotive ideas in a much higher plane. This is a kind of a hard concept
to get across to an audience that spans the age range from 12 to into
the 70s but I hope we can do it. If you have questions along the way stop me
and afterwards I'll take time for questioning as well.
Why should a brass player exercise? Actually brass playing is work. It's much
like training for a marathon, training to run the 100-yard dash or training to do
some other athletic endeavor. Brass playing really is an athletic endeavor
and playing our instrument does not give us the kind of background that we need
to be the best brass player we can be. We need to be physically fit while brass
playing can tire you out and and you can be emotionally exhausted. You don't get
aerobic exercise from playing your horn so we need to get that somewhere else.
The breathing exercises are the beginning of that. The breathing exercises that
we've been doing have a lot to do with your physical fitness for brass playing.
They train specific muscles that we use every day but they don't give us a
cardiovascular workout which gives us the endurance, improves our respiratory
function. Tomorrow when we do our lecture on the physiology of respiration I
hope to have a spirometer here that will show you the great differences in each
of your vital capacities and when you think that it's the amount of wind and
the rate at which you put it through that instrument that controls the sounds
you make you'll recognize the importance of aerobic training. The benefits of
aerobic training beyond just what we get in improved brass playing are that it
will lower your blood pressure, help you lose weight, decrease your risk of
cardiovascular disease, decrease the lipid count in your in your blood, the
fats, the cholesterol and triglycerides that we we hear about and increase our
sense of well-being probably through a chemical in a group called endorphins in
our brain. We know that emotions probably all are related to these
endorphins and any of you that exercise regularly will recognize that there is
an exercisers high that will addict you to exercising. You get the same sort of
stuff when you play well. I know that when I have a good day and playing goes
well then the rest of my world seems to be pretty okay and it has a lot to do
with the chemical biochemical changes in our central nervous system through
endorphins. Let's talk a little bit about the risk factors for cardiovascular
disease since that's the number one thing that kills most Americans and it
starts early in childhood and as a progressive disease it culminates
depending upon genetics and your lifestyle in the late 60s and 70s with
heart attacks, strokes and other kinds of problems. The risk factors for
cardiovascular disease were determined by a study that looked at a town in
Massachusetts called Framingham. They looked at this town for several
generations. Harvard University conducted the study for the American Heart
Association and they watched how these people died and then they quantified the
things that all the people that died had in common. They looked at various
diseases but when they looked at cardiovascular disease they found that
the most common thing that people had that died of heart attacks was overweight
and so that's the number one risk factor for cardiovascular disease, strokes and
heart attack and by overweight we mean 20% beyond your ideal weight. So it's an
important thing to keep your weight under control to control those risk
factors. The second risk factor is increased blood pressure. Blood pressure
which is higher than 140 over 90 is generally thought to be too high and
should be brought down. In the old days it was thought that you could let the
top number get a little bit higher as you got older and you allowed the
elderly patients to have blood pressures of 160 over 90 or or even a little bit
more and didn't really get worried about it but recent studies have really shown
that statistically people don't die from strokes and heart attacks as readily if
their blood pressure is 140 over 90 or less. Smoking is the number three risk
factor and that's pretty much gotten through to the American public. Finally
after years and years of combating the billion dollar advertising that that we
have to to do search do a lifestyles that kill us we're finally getting
through a little bit. It's probably the most ridiculous thing in our society the
way we deal with with smoking. We fund smoking we we pay them to grow these
crops and two-thirds of our medical dollar goes to cure the ills created by
smoking and our health care system is collapsing because we can't afford it.
Smoking is a ridiculous thing and most people want to stop and lots of people
have and those that haven't are being aided in a great way by some new
advances nicotine patches come out which really helps people as usual there are
always some questions about new things but this works. Nicotine is the worst
addiction there is. An article I just reviewed compared the addiction to
heroin and milligram per milligram nicotine is ten times as addicting. I've
worked in the alcohol recovery ward and in charge of the medical aspects of the
ward for some time and seen many people who are able to break the alcohol habit
drug habit but not the cigarette habit. Nicotine is a real killer and the one
thing that brass players do not want to get into is the chew habit the chaw
habit that you see out in the front under the lower lip. The incidence of
head and neck cancer in these people is about 70% higher than in a normal
population. If you add alcohol to tobacco the incidence of head and neck cancer
is about 90% higher than the population that doesn't smoke and doesn't drink.
You rarely see cancer of the head and neck and people that don't drink or
don't smoke so I'm giving you these this information because it's important for
you to have it I'm not telling you how to live I'm asking you to make decisions
based on scientific evidence that you might not otherwise have. So smoking is
the third risk factor for cardiovascular disease and the fourth is diabetes
diabetes mellitus as opposed to diabetes insipidus. Diabetes mellitus is the one
where blood sugar goes too high. We don't know a whole lot about this disease we
we've known it for a long time but we we haven't understood it much better than
we did when we first discovered it. The blood sugar is elevated and it bathes
all the tissues the cells in sugar and when this happens all kinds of strange
things begin to go wrong arteriosclerosis the narrowing of the arteries goes at
about 12 times the rate of individual without diabetes and the kind of
narrowing is an entirely different kind of narrowing instead of having areas
near bifurcations of vessels that are narrowed the diabetic gets little little
squeeze spots all through his circulation and what we call a ratty
arteriosclerotic pattern so they're poor candidates for coronary bypasses because
they really don't have places that we can jump the bypass to and if you see
enough coronary surgery you'll recognize without anybody telling you that this is
a diabetic patient just by looking at his arteries. Diabetes involves the
endocrinology of lipids cholesterol and triglycerides and and the physiology of
nerve conduction a lot of things that we don't really understand and I think that
in years to come we're going to know that diabetes is probably tied in with
the lipids in this thing called arteriosclerotic vascular disease so the
last risk factor of the top five is the increase in lipids and you hear people
talk about cholesterol and triglyceride I'm going to I'm going through this real
quickly because what I've given you is there's a lot of physiology and I'm
always concerned about trying to get this through to an audience with of this
wide range but when we get done hopefully I can explain it to those of
you that it's gone by the lipids in a thumbnail sketch you hear people talk
about high density lipid proteins and low density lipid proteins I want you to
understand this because it's not hard to understand there's no reason why you
can't be knowledgeable if you'll think of your blood vessel as a tube lined by
Velcro and you'll think of cholesterol particles as Velcro balls of different
sizes that roll down through this artery of Velcro these small balls we'll call
the low density lipoproteins that's lightweight when you spin them in a
center centrifuge these stay up at the top they're not heavy and then the real
small ones we'll call VLDLs are very lightweight or very low density
lipoproteins these come rolling through the the artery and they are so like they
stick to the Velcro they're not heavy enough to roll on through then you take
the high-density heavyweight lipoproteins that are our good fats HDLs they come
rolling through and they are too heavy to get stuck to the artery they actually
pull these other ones off as they roll through so that's why you hear people
talking about things called ratios the ratios of good and bad fats often you'll
see a number called your total cholesterol over your HDL that ratio
should be a low number less than 4.5 in order to keep yourself from having all
these low density things stick here what happens when you smoke is that these
things for some reason are a lot stickier and they stick to the walls the
platelets which are the the blood cell that causes coagulation of the blood
also becomes stickier so if this is going on in a little tiny artery that's
that big and they're all sticking to the wall and you're smoking the blood is
just trickling through their red cell by red cell and then you add the platelets
stickiness and it plugs everything up right there and you get what's called a
thrombosis and that means there's no blood going by that spot and so the
heart if that's what we're talking about or any organ that's fed by the blood
vessels is going to die beyond there let's say this blood vessel is feeding
a big portion of the heart supposed to come on down like this and stay open if
it is blocked right there then this whole area is going to die and that
muscle is not going to get oxygen because these bad fats have blocked that
up and we do coronary bypasses you try and jump those blockages if you're
lucky enough to have a nice blockage in one spot we need to protect our ears too
okay we also need to think about protecting our lungs and there are all
kinds of things that are out there every day this morning when I ran in the
smog I couldn't help but thinking how bad it must be to exercise long-term in
this kind of situation and I think that we're going to find out that people who
have lived in smog for years and years especially those that also smoke are
going to have the same kind of lung problems that we're seeing now heavy
long-term smokers with lung cancer and those things that's just a prediction by
way of trying to put this all together the lungs need to be protected on the
job if you're a brass player and you're sitting in a smoke-filled room or the
fellows next to you are smoking you're going to get just as much problem as the
guy that's smoking that good studies show that the side stream smoke is more
detrimental than actually smoking a cigarette in many instances again I'm
trying to cover all kinds of physiology in a short period of time but it's not a
breed of etiquette a breach of etiquette to say would you please not smoke
that's okay and we need to be affirmative in that area and not be
feeling like it's it's something that's a social okay because it's not okay
socially to do that it wouldn't be okay for me to come into your house and blow
sit all over your drapes but that's the same thing that's happening to you when
you sit by a guy that's smoking and you breathe his side scene smoke only to
your lungs and your lungs that can't go to the dry cleaner and get clean I hope
tomorrow that the biology firm will let me borrow some of their lung sections
that show you the kind of stuff that gets filtered through your lungs
having done a lot of open-heart surgery I have seen all sorts of lungs and believe
me it's amazing the fudge factor that's built into the body you can abuse your
body and smoke until those lungs are just black and you're still feeling okay
and you're doing great we open you up for another problem and I look at the
lungs and I say my goodness how does this guy even function that's how bad
the lungs get before you really get any warning and the lungs don't give you
warning you feel pretty good people say why should I stop smoking I feel fine
there's no fudge factor that it's an exponential kind of progression it gets
the one spot and overnight you have symptoms you can't breathe you can't lie
flat at night and you're wheezing and you can't walk you can't get to the
dinner table or the bathroom or anything else and then you stop smoking so it
doesn't make much sense to do these things after the fact that a lot of
patients get mad at me they said well I finally quit smoking and I don't feel
any better the reason is they quit too late most people deal with it much after
the fact but you need to watch your exposure to other things lots of pollen
problems and dust exposure for people that work on farms in the San Joaquin
Valley there's coccidio mitosis which is is raising its head again it's an
infection that we see up and down the valley from the wind that people breathe
farmers and people that paint and that sort of thing it's got to wear masks and
respirators and those sorts of things you're a brass player especially you
need to do these things especially if you're an asthmatic a lot of brass
players are asthmatics and I think that people that that are healthy and that
play their instrument protect themselves by keeping the lungs in shape through
their plane another thing that I've seen quite a few people for and had calls
from all around the world on our brass players who get communicable diseases
from one another and that comes mainly from playing each other's instruments
you know how you go to a brass conference and there's all these
instruments from the different companies out there to play and you I
used to just enjoy doing that until I realized that have you ever cleaned out
your instrument look what comes out of it I you know Larry Seuss is going to
tell us how to do that and you should do it every couple of weeks well I
somebody said I hope you keep your surgical instruments cleaner than your
trumpet and I said well if somebody would clean my trumpet for me I'd be in
good shape because somebody takes care of my instruments but when I clean my
trumpet it comes out in a pre-formed kind of tube that looks just like my my
my slide I go japers what is this I took one of those samples to the lab and had
them culture it under one of my son's names and I I got this panty call from
the lab that said you got a bad thing going here this patient has everything
known to man and it was all the all the bugs that we fear the most and have no
antibiotics to treat are in your horn so along with the bacteria that we can deal
with go the viruses that we don't have much to offer if you get mononucleosis
which went through a trumpet section in Las Vegas where Carl was playing called
call me one time he said man everybody's wiped out well how do we all get this I
said you guys sound like you got mononucleosis why don't you go get
checks they went and sure enough they all had mononucleosis titers and they'd
all been playing each other's horns trying mouthpieces and that sort of
thing when my ears are still ringing so don't do that I know that it's hard to
figure out which instrument you want to buy when you can't blow a bunch of them
you got to do some of that but by and large if your neighbor is coughing and
spitting and sputtering don't pick up his tuba and blow it I can't imagine
what yeah Larry
that's right it's a great culture media you know we've got all kinds of bacteria
within us all the time and if our body didn't defend us against it we'd be sick
but you blow that out into a nice moist warm horn put it away in your case and
leave in the Sun for a few days it's like the blob it's just is an amazing
creature inside your horn but you're not sick because your body protects you from
it and it was really scary to me when I realized what was in inside the horn but
hepatitis is another virus like mononucleosis that I've seen go through
brass sections and you want to protect yourself from that by not playing
somebody else's instruments I've seen sore throats and all kinds of things
strep and that sort of thing culture right out of the horn and so that's a
bad idea bacteria grow in warm moist places and the horn is an ideal place
for that we don't know what's going to happen with AIDS we know that hepatitis
is the model of which we base our research and our prevention of AIDS on
because it's a virus transmitted by droplet particle so that AIDS may be a
very real threat as it becomes more prominent in the general population all
right I'd like to talk now after we've talked about the horror stories a bit
nutrition again keeping in mind the reason we're doing this is that even
though the arts are a subjective form we need to understand cognitively what
we're doing and apply that science to making better music the whole idea here
is to be able to be technically more proficient in order to produce better
music your music is limited by your technical abilities the technical
abilities are limited by your your physiology and the way you develop this
athletic endeavor of playing a brass instrument so we're really bringing
together the art and the science you can't have one without the other I have
a hard time with these people that tell me they have a big dichotomy between
science art and philosophy it's not really hard for me to understand how
that all works because I think it all it all functions by the same laws and so
that's what I'm trying to tell you all this about I'm giving you hopefully in
an hour the physiology lessons that would take a year in class so I hope I'm
not losing a whole lot of people in years past I'm amazed how many people
have grasped all this stuff and it's been well received so let me know if I'm
getting by on this stuff nutrition is really important and I know you all are
suffering a nutrition change at this camp and it's interesting to me because
it still it shows me that Americans really have ingrained in them habit
patterns that kill them it's like Ken Cooper who I did some seminars with a
few years back always tells the audience he says it's not that so much that we die
it's that we kill ourselves we don't wear seat belts and so the greatest
majority of our deaths occur from car accidents we don't eat right and a lot
of our health problems have to do with the fact that we don't care and feed for
our body in the way that we should we're now realizing that complex carbohydrates
are the basic fuel that our body needs to live healthily we don't need a lot of
protein we need a certain percentage of protein and every time I look at
something that percentage gets lower but those of you that train for fitness
will recognize that there's really something to carbohydrate loading you
have more energy for the event that you're about to enter and that's
because we burn carbohydrates more efficiently than we do proteins and you
know it used to be said raw steak was trumpet player food and you know Claude
used to give me a bad time because I'd have spaghetti and marinara sauce while
he was having his steak and I you know he'd say how come they don't eat
trumpet food you know raw eggs and raw steak the evidence is the evidence is
there that that's where we get these low density and very low density lipid
proteins that I was describing to you the small velcro balls that don't go
through the tube they stick to the walls that comes along with the saturated fats
that we get from this protein source I think you all understand that stuff but
it's hard to put into action because we have an ingrained society that doesn't
really deal with this very well we have lots of information but putting it into
action is a different thing we've got all kinds of economic and political
reasons to keep the sources of food that we use going we could launch off into a
whole lot of environmental things here about how costly it is to really eat the
the high protein diet that we eat but I won't do it let's talk about the bulk in
our diet we need to have enough bulk that we keep things digesting and the
incidence of cancer of the bowel is directly related to the bulk in the diet
the incidence of diverticulosis the little out pouchings along the bowel
that come about the age of 50 is much lower an interesting study was done at
UCLA and they compared physicians because they were easy to track and they
picked Mormon physicians because they are pretty clean living they don't drink
and they don't smoke and they don't use caffeine but they do eat meat and they
picked physicians who are Seventh-day Adventists because they don't do all
those things plus most of them don't eat meat and they wanted to see what the
incidence of heart disease and cancer in both groups were and by far and away
the cancers of the GI tract were almost not present in the non meat eaters
especially early on they followed these this cohort of people this group of
people for about 30 years and they found that the incidence of arteriosclerosis
was about the same a little bit lower than on meat eaters but the incidence of
cancer was way down until they got into middle life and then in middle life all
of a sudden everything became about the same there's all sorts of postulation
about what this might mean and some of the suggestions were that the fact that
the stress of middle life probably has a lot to do with the immune system and
things that we don't understand that deal with malignancy interesting aside
when you think of bulk in your diet because bulk in your diet also fits with
complex carbohydrates which you get from fruits and vegetables so those are
factors to think about decreasing your saturated fats we've talked about now I
want to switch gears a little bit and talk to you not only about the the care
and the feeding of the machine but also the exercise of the machine I want you
to know how to exercise correctly because you can exercise incorrectly just
as you can play your blast brass instrument incorrectly and get nowhere
so you need to exercise for cardiovascular fitness with a certain purpose in mind
and that is to build your ability to exercise using less energy as the muscle
becomes more efficient it requires less oxygen to do the same task so that as
you train for a marathon run as you become more efficient you don't have to
work so hard to get the same job done the same thing happens with trumpet
playing that's why or brass playing excuse me this is not a trumpet can
that's why it's so important for you to do the daily breathing exercises and to
get into a running schedule because you want your your physiology to work at its
ultimate peak and be the most efficient so you don't have to do as much work to
play so you need to train aerobically and that means you need to get your
heart rate up into a fitness training heart rate when I write an exercise
prescription for my patients I write it based on American College of Sports
Medicine's research which says that an exercise prescription needs to have
these four quantities included under exercise RX over there you see number
one mode number two intensity number three duration and number four the
frequency in order to exercise effectively you need to include all of
those parameters and let's take the first one the mode needs to be the way
that you exercise in some aerobic activity by that we mean a continuous
activity that raises your heart rate as opposed to an intermittent activity like
weightlifting that builds muscle but does not build aerobic fitness most
people pick one of the following running bicycling swimming racquetball
some of those things running bicycling and swimming are without doubt the best
cross-country skiing is right in there too but you need to pick a mode of
exercise that you enjoy so that you become addicted to it and you train
yourself to be better and better certainly walking running or bicycling
are great for brass players the intensity has to do with the heart rate at which
you train and I'm going to go through this rather rapidly I've written a model
working that out to the far left but basically your training heart rate the
rate the heart rate at which you should keep your heart during your training
exercise can be calculated by taking your age from 220 so if you're 40 years
old I know that nobody here is that old except for me your maximum heart rate
would be 180 by that we mean that based on what we know about your age it's
unlikely that your heart rate will go above 180 when I have you on the
treadmill going at your very best so we then come back and we take 180 as your
maximum heart rate and we subtract from it your resting heart rate that's the
heart rate that you have before you get out of bed in the morning I put 80 up
there most of you should be below that in fact a good way to test your aerobic
fitness is to take your pulse at rest just sitting here in your chair anything
below 70 is good anything below 60 is better anything in the 50s is excellent
marathon runners will have a resting pulse in the 40 so your heart is so much
more efficient doesn't have to beat as many times to get the same amount of
blood through the system so for purposes of math I put 80 as the heart as a
resting heart rate we subtract that from your maximum heart rate that leaves us
with a hundred we call that your reserve heart rate that's the number of heart
beats that you have to use to train with so you could see that the poor
conditions you are the smaller that gap is going to be so we come down with a
reserve heart rate of a hundred most people who have no health problems I
wanted to have them start training at an 80% of that reserve so I take 80% of a
hundred which is 80 I added back to the resting heart rate and I get the
training heart rate of 160 so that's where I would start with this
hypothetical person and I would train him to take his pulse usually at the
carotid artery which is right in front of that long muscle called the sternocleidomastoid
that's right here in the front of your neck and take it with the fat
part of your fingers don't take it right with the ends with the fat part of your
fingers right there and if you do it enough times you'll get good enough that
you can guess within ten where your heart rate is I never count a patient's
pulse anymore I just listen to their heart and I can tell you within two or
three beats per minute within just ten seconds how fast their heart rate is and
that's what you need to get to when you take your own pulse and take it for ten
seconds and multiply it by six and you've got your number now most of you
will probably not be able to do this but the duration needs to be at least 30
minutes if you haven't been exercising regularly 30 minutes will be hard for
you to do number three the duration ought to be at least 30 minutes and you
need to have your heart rate in that training area to begin to get training
effect unfortunately when you're not fit you've got to start with what we call
interval training where you get your heart rate up into the training area for
five minutes and then you slow it down you walk for five minutes then you get
back up until gradually you can be you can do more and more continuous exercise
but we want that whole exercise period to be at least 30 minutes most of you
here are probably healthy enough that you won't need to go see a physician
about it the American College of Sports Medicine recommends this if you're over
35 you shouldn't undertake a training program without a stress test by someone
who's a member of the American College of Sports Medicine or has lots of
interest in that way so they can write you a real good exercise prescription
the frequency or if you have other health problems if you have high blood
pressure if you have diabetes if you you know had heart problems definitely don't
go out and do this sort of stuff this is my disclaimer on the frequency needs to
be at least three times a week we used to feel that three times a week was
enough but I've read some articles recently that would like to see you do
it three to five times a week if you can I preferably like to get it in about
five times because the endorphins really make a difference when I first started
into this stuff about 25 years ago they were just beginning to deal with this
and Ken Cooper had all the stuff out from the Air Force aerobics and they
started talking about this in this high they didn't know what endorphins were
but this exercise addiction and I really found that if I ran in the morning my day
went like I'd had three cups of coffee and I never had any but if I didn't by
noon I was not feeling that same endorphin high and I definitely I want
to exercise in the morning in order to make my day go I don't always get that
done but that's what I strive for and I'd really urge you to find that spot
in your life because it's a real tremendous equanimity for the rest of
your day and it definitely is one of those things that's been put into the
cognitive resources that we have that I want you to add to your brass plane
because this whole thing needs to be integrated with what we're doing how
much time do I have Tom so 220 okay great man I've really buzzed through a
whole lot of stuff quickly before before we open it up for questions I'd like to
cover a couple of things that we usually cover in a separate lecture but
we didn't have time for this year and that are some of the problems that we
see and that we get calls on from brass players and one of the most frequent is
chest pain everybody thinks they're having heart attacks because when they
start breathing correctly and playing correctly and regularly the muscles that
they begin to use get sore and many people develop right along the the
medial side of the scapula particularly in trumpet players that hold your horn
some real fibrous nodules I've got a fibrous nodule right there that my wife
can find every night real easily and she can pretty much tell whether I've been
practicing or not and people that aren't ready for that are worried because they
think it's unnatural but if you're breathing correctly you're going to get
sore you're going to have some anterior or front chest discomfort from the
sternum being raised you're going to have some soreness in your neck because
as we'll see in the slides tomorrow these neck muscles fight to hold the
chest wall up on the pictures particularly of Larry Sousa when we did
this project you can see that these sternocleidomastoid and the other
rhomboid neck muscles just fighting to hold this chest cage up and make it a
full tank and that's why the neck begins to really grow because these muscles
are getting tremendous exercise but they also get sore another problem that that
people talk to me a lot about is folliculitis folliculitis are these
little puffs or sores that come around the top of the lip and they'll
especially come if you're using a lot of Vaseline or whatever you use on your
lip because it clogs these little pores sometimes just playing a lot well just
having you know when we lick our chops they're wet and we tend to clog these
pores and people look at these and they feel like they're pimples and so they
want to squeeze them and they get bigger and get worse so I use some antibiotic
ointments and actually it's a solution not an ointment because it dries it out
you want a drying effect and cleosan t which is an antibiotic that your doctor
can prescribe for you works real well it's the same thing we give to kids with
acne and it knocks the bacterial countdown which is really what's going
on in there and makes them go away a lot quicker the other thing we hear a lot
about are cold sores herpes simplex this is a virus actually the same or not
exactly the same but relative of chicken pox virus the varicella virus but on the
lips we call it chick herpes simplex and the very best way to treat that is with
a medication that is also prescribed now called Zovra X is over acts as a spin
on the research done for genital herpes but we find it about twice the dosage
five times a day it'll take care of these cold sores and if they keep
reoccurring you can take it in pulses to keep it under control other people have
done use lysine and some other things we used to zap them with silver nitrate and
that sort of stuff that leaves scars and that's not very acceptable
Zovra X is a real important thing and you should write that down and ask the
doctor for it to get it it's Z-O-R-Z-O-V-I-R-A-X
that'll work for the herpes simplex on the lips or in the mouth the same thing
it also works works great for shingles which is you know when you get they
fall follows the nerve pathways you get a blister that breaks out all around the
chest I've had people who came in and thought they were having a heart attack
that we're really having shingles or herpes zoster and it works for that so
those are some of the things in terms of emergency first aid the other thing I
want you to think about is your ears because if you don't have your ears you
can't make music and you get to be like Manny Klein who wears his ear his
hearing aids and puts his head down over the piano to hear the chord changes
and he still plays good but if he'd been deaf early in his life he wouldn't play
like he does so we don't want you to get deaf and loud sounds in a trumpet
section or other brass section is about the best way I know except for sitting
in front of the symbol to go deaf and it seems like fifth trumpet players sit in
front of the symbol most of the time that's another good reason to get good
anyway anyway there are some some interesting things that are out on the
market now to prevent your your hearing loss I've used cotton and all sorts of
things but I know Bruce and Rich have ordered some stuff what tell them about
if you don't want to go to all that expense when I give lessons I often put
these little things in my ears that are used for pliers you know the little soft
things that you can if you're a pilot in putting your ears so that's that's
something to really watch out for ear infections are just as deadly you had a
trumpet player with an ear infection or a brass player excuse me with a trumpet
with a ear infection or a sinus infection and he's really in trouble
because he he's not hearing the sounds of his own horn through his ear but
he's hearing it through the vibration of the bones in his head and that's a
bizarre sound especially if it's only coming from one ear and it affects your
intonation your pitch and the whole ability to make things work so make sure
you keep your ears in good shape and if you have problems tend to them
immediately chronic infections that sort of thing cause hearing loss another
real quickie I'm not a dentist but I certainly have had some experience with
problems with teeth and just not to get into it at this point but to say that I
think it's a real smart thing to have an impression made especially of your
upper teeth if you're real serious about brass playing and don't let the
dentist keep it take it home with you and keep it where you know it where it
is so something changes you can pull it out and take it back and say this is how
my teeth were because you're you're training all these muscles to blow over
the teeth and changes there can affect you I don't want that to become a big
psychological thing but I want you to be aware that it can be a problem and
you can overcome these things I'm sure by just continuing to play but you can
also shorten that time by having a dentist that knows how to work with you
and is cooperative but you've got to take the initiative and telling what you
want and and say here's my model this is the way my teeth look make them work
like that so used by being better physically fit kind of a big mouthful it
covers a lot of philosophy and science and a bunch of stuff but it's really
important because the arts really bring all this stuff together as far as I'm
concerned it's not a it's not a mating that it is not likely it's it's an
easily understood thing and we've talked about the things that you don't want to
have happen the risk factors for the major diseases that you can get that can
get in your way we've talked about how to protect your lungs and how to deal
with protection against infection we talked about nutrition we talked about
lipids we talked about aerobic exercise other than that I think you guys are
pretty much ready for at least your nursing board okay question
everybody understands it a hundred percent
the hour you take a big breath and go to do your range sitting right there the
intercostal muscles between the ribs to get a little spasm in them and it causes
sudden pain the nerves run right under the ribs and the muscles are they run
right through the muscles no no that's what we're talking about the herpes
simplex the little craters is that what you're talking about the little white
that's the same thing yeah as opposed to places that are chronically irritated by
your teeth you got to watch for them those aren't herpes simplex those are
just chronic irritation it's important to have them paid attention to too because
chronic irritation causes malignancy
it does a hiccup is caused by stimulation of the phrenic nerve the
phrenic nerve is the involuntary nerve that supplies the diaphragm we have no
way to control or move the diaphragm voluntarily but a hiccup is an extra
stimulation of the phrenic nerve that causes the diaphragm to pop up and down
and we don't know how that all happens we know that it's surgery if you squeeze
the phrenic nerve you can cure hiccups she could also cause a diaphragm to go
flat Larry
has something to do probably with the air and expansion of the stomach which
sits right on the diaphragm and can cause some irritation just by its
physical presence certainly causes belching from a whole other standpoint
but yeah you're right weight training I don't know of anything the exercises that
are done with the breathing exercises are probably the anaerobic exercises that
are the best for developing that and it's also like many sports the best
exercises are doing it
go ahead ladies
orthopedic problems of exercise I had on my list but didn't talk about and it's
really important because as you begin to train and you get up there into that 85%
of physically fit you start paying tremendous orthopedic penalties so that
it pays not to be over fit I find that if I run more than five miles a day my
back hurts my knees hurt my feet hurt if I stick to below five miles on most days
I don't have those things and most most patients tell me that same thing shoes
are really important especially if you depending upon your foot strike if
you've got a physician that you know that is in the sports medicine he'll
watch you walk and watch the way your foot rotates and you need I wear
orthotics in my shoes I get knee problems from my foot over rotating and
it pulls the patella across the knee and an angle and that causes lots of
problems so good shoes and and those things are really important
basically I don't think playing hurts them they're a virus that's there whether
you play or not if it if it isn't painful it's not going to cause the
infection we're right under your mouthpiece at mine but most of them once
in a while somebody has one right under the mouthpiece but not too long yes sir
well let me just tell you a little experience my wife got me for my
birthday a valve from bone which incidentally knocked about half an octave
off my range on my trumpet but I got it from a guy he's dying of cancer and he
had a bad emphysema bad bronchitis and I didn't play it for about three months I
took it apart and I brought home the sterilizing solution that I have from
the office and I soaked it Matt and I ran it through that and I let I cleaned
it out left it out in the Sun you know I don't know I'm sure that you could
sterilize a trumpet just like any other or any other brass instrument and get
rid of the bugs I'm sure you can do that and that's what I think I did by using
the same sterilizing solution that I use for instruments and I think that's a
reasonable thing to do but if you're healthy good soap and water is probably
all you need to do to get kill those back you're just leaving them out there
in the air these bacteria grow in warm moist spots that's the thing to remember
warm and moist you know it's the same thing with abscesses anywhere if they're
in a body cavity where it's warm moist and dark they're gonna grow
be hard for me to think that there's so many variables that it'd be hard for me
to think it come from your horn yes sir I know how you feel sometimes when I have
the flu and I play and I think am I really keep myself going here because I
haven't put my horn well the lead pipe is where things really collect and you
know all you have to do is raise that just a little bit and I think you could
get yuck from the lead pipe pretty easily that's that first bin okay what
any other questions or anything okay thanks