Are you here to live, or here to live a long time?

Great post by someone on a taiji forum - he's a neurosurgeon.

"Naturally, a lot more time,money & energy has gone into examining ways to enhance performance in the short term & very little investigation has gone into the long term effect of training. Why? - its perfectly easy to understand IMO. If you want to play it safe & be sure you make it to a ripe old age, you do everything in moderation & avoid stuff that is likely to overstress whatever (knees, hips, spine...)-- that is not gonna make you a superstar. To get really good, you gonna have to take some risks & in sports that means risks with your health. Not being stupid, you try to calculate which risks give you the most bang for your buck & supplement your training with practices designed to mitigate your risk. That is playing it smart. If you justify your training by saying you know of this & that guy that did this & is ok, you are trying to psychologically get comfortable with your choice of risks. Look i do the same damn thing, I continue to spar & take head shots despite the fact that I can actually quote you literature that shows how bad that can be (this one has been studied). I wear a mouthguard & I have a 17.5 inch neck (I'm only 5'9"). I poo poo my wife's warning with the occassional post-concussive symptoms but - come on man - who am I kidding. I have done surgery on a bunch of old fighters with parkinsons & with neck problems.

So what is the point of this long winded post? Patients often come in & ask should I avoid this, that, whatever.... My response is similar to the last paragraph. Are you on this planet to enjoy your time or just live a long time. If you want to live forever, be careful, be safe, be boring & good luck. If you wanna have some fun, well that is a lot more interesting (I think a better way to live) but it may catch up with you (it may not). So if you love horseback riding but you have had back surgery & wanna know if there is a chance continuing to horseback ride could lead to more back problems - well, duh of course there is. On the otherhand, you love horseback riding, why would you stop?"

I liked the cut of his cloth :)