Bow Legs No More
A natural focus to bow legs treatments
A large percentage of children will develop bow legs. However, the condition tends to correct itself over time. If it does not, corrective measures need to be employed. Fortunately, these are natural and painless methods that involve diet supplementation and exercise. Special methods of stretching, the right exercises and a course of special nutrition are often enough to cure bow legs naturally.
How do you know if you have bow legs?
It’s easy to tell if a person has bow legs – if they stand with their feet together, the knees will still be some distance from each other. The greater this distance between the knees, the more pronounced the condition is.
What can cause bow legs?
Any one of a number of factors, actually. In one case, it could simply be some abnormal influence in early childhood that causes the legs to develop with a curve. Sometimes parents put their children into a walker before the child is actually ready for it – the child’s young legs, not yet being able to take the weight of the child, develop a curve. Blount’s disease is another factor that could cause bow legs. Lead poisoning is yet another potential cause of bow legs. But one of the most common causes is a deficiency of Vitamin D – which is rather sad, really, as that is so easy to correct.
Methods of treating bow legs
One of the first things that you must do if you have bow legs is have a doctor look at you to determine what actually caused the bow legs. You might wonder why this is necessary.
It is necessary, because the cause of your bowed legs may not be in the past, but instead might be due to a disease or disorder that you still have. If this is so, the disease will have to be treated first, before you attempt to correct the bowed legs. Once this is done, or if the doctor confirms that you don’t have a disorder that is causing your bow legs, you can then progress to trying to cure the bow legs.
You can cure bow legs at home
Vitamin and calcium supplementation and special exercises can be used to treat bow legs at home. This supplementation is especially important because a lack of vitamin D in the body can actually be one of the causes of bow legs. Exposure to sunlight is an excellent way to get the body to increase its innate production of vitamin D, but in certain special cases it might be necessary to actually take a multivitamin supplement. Exercises need to focus on strengthening the muscles of the legs, especially those of the upper thighs. Exercises that strengthen the calves and the hamstrings are equally important. Finally, ‘stressors’ are important. These are exercises that, once the muscles of the legs are strengthened sufficiently, work to straighten the actual structure of the leg.
That’s all that it takes to cure bow legs at home. The correct nutrition, the correct supplementation, and a carefully formulated course of exercises to straighten and strengthen the legs.
All-Natural methods of straightening your legs
It’s rather sad that in this modern world, where bow legs are so easily prevented and cured, that many people go through life suffering from this condition. Of course, how easily bow legs can be corrected depends to a great extent upon the severity of the condition and the age of the person suffering from it. In very young children, even severe bow legs can be corrected swiftly and easily. In an older child, leg braces may be needed, but the bow legs are still easily curable. After the age of twenty, determination and will-power are necessary to cure bow legs, but the cure is still possible, and relatively easily.
Exercises to cure bow legs in adults
Before you actually proceed to methods of curing bow legs holistically, you must first examine your diet. Remember that a great many people who have bow legs originally developed the condition because of a lack of vitamin D and calcium. Have yourself tested for a dietary deficiency in these areas. Your doctor can easily recommend the requisite tests. If they come back showing a deficiency, ask your doctor for a list of foods or supplementation (or both) that will correct this deficiency.
The food you eat is the foundation of your health
If your diet is lacking the right nutrients, no course of corrective exercises will help. Make sure the foundation of your health is in order before you take treating your bow legs one step further. Generally speaking you need not only supplementation in calcium, but also in Vitamin D. But that’s only to start with. Fatty acids such as those found in fish or seeds are also crucial to curing bow legs.
Surgery isn’t required
The simple fact is that in this modern age, methods of exercise and physical therapy are certainly advanced enough to cure bow legs without necessitating surgery. Of course, this more natural approach requires a few months of time – but what’s a few months spent in curing your bow legs, as opposed to a lifetime of perfect good health?
A composite approach
Before the advent of modern medicine, treatments for bow legs used to fail because people never understood that the body was a composite whole. They didn’t realize that a combined approach to curing bow legs was needed, with attention paid equally to diet and nutrition, to physical therapy and exercise to strengthen the muscles, with special systems like yoga to enhance the flexibility of the joints.
Using a combined approach that merges these different systems gives results in very reasonable periods of time. Best of all, these approaches are painless and perfectly safe, unlike surgery, which always poses a potential threat to one’s health. Another crucial element that a good program to correct bow legs will focus on is posture. You may have noticed that bow legs and incorrect posture go together. What was that I was saying about the body being a composite whole? Exactly. Correcting the posture also goes a long way towards correcting bow legs.
Alternatives to Surgery
For those who have normal legs, it can be difficult to imagine the desperation caused by having bow legs as an adult. In a child, bowed legs can often be straightened, sometimes with medical braces, but an adult seems doomed to a life of reduced physical activity, and of imminent arthritis.
Arthritis is a serious risk
The bowed shape of the legs can cause an extremely abnormal gait when walking. The very weight of a person’s body puts intense, abnormal pressure on the joints of the knees and ankles when walking, or indeed when engaging in just about any physical activity. The angles of the limbs to the joints of the legs also places a severe strain upon the joints.
It goes without saying that this limits a person’s quality of life. A person cannot engage in many sports, and must respond more or less like a cripple when faced with many physical activities. But the pain and discomfort is only the beginning of a person’s problems. The stress on the joints leads to inflammation, which in turn leads to arthritis, and ultimately, if left untreated, to complete degeneration of the joints.
Is surgery a realistic option?
Not really. Just consider the risks. The surgeon will actually remove or even break some of the bones in your legs. This carries a massive risk of infection, and certainly a risk of damage to your nerves. If the nerves are damaged, you will be left with a permanent disability – a permanent loss of function in one of your legs.
Worse, the surgeon will actually put metal clamps on you, attaching them to your legs to maintain the shape of your legs post surgery. There will be permanent scars that you will have to bear with for the rest of your life. Finally, there’s the recovery period… it might take three or more months to recover, and you’ll have to find a way to take that time out of your life. Not to mention that the recovery will be painful.
What’s the cure?
A special diet will correct the malnutrition that is usually at the core of a bow legs problem. When I say malnutrition, I don’t mean that you aren’t eating enough. Rather, you’re probably missing out on crucial elements and vitamins in your diet, and the lack of these is causing your legs to be bow legged. There’s nothing to worry about – this can very easily be corrected by a course of vitamin and mineral supplementation.
And then there’s exercise. The body’s posture needs to be corrected through yogic exercises. The strong muscles of the thighs need to be properly trained to support the leg. The hamstrings and tendons also need to be strengthened by special exercises. And finally, exercises need to be done that will gradually, over a period of a few months, correct the curvature of the legs. That’s all that it takes to cure bow legs.
What Actually Cause Bowed Legs and Knock-Knees
When one talks about bow legs what immediately comes to mind is that distinctive bend or curve in the shape of the legs. While standing upright with the ankles of both feet touching, one finds it virtually impossible to get one’s knees to touch each other. Bow legs is medically known as genu varum, and involves a bent or curved shin bone and thigh bone, resulting in a curved leg.
All babies are born with bow legs due to the way they are forced to remain curled up within the mother’s womb. Most of these babies grow out of it naturally. Of course, those who don’t lose their bow legs in the first 3 years of growth, can end up living with it all their lives. This can become increasingly troublesome and eventually even lead to one developing arthritis due to the damage caused by using joints that are continuously under strain.
It’s important to understand what causes bow legs in the first place. Knowing the causes can certainly aid in deciding what options you may want to choose from as a remedy for the condition. Bow legs can be caused by various factors, such as the lack of vitamin D, Blount’s disease, under-nourishment, a history of broken bones and fractures, or even poisoning by lead or fluoride.
Dietary deficiency
Children who do not get sufficient exercise often lack vitamin D. This is not surprising, as the lack of exercise usually correlates to the fact that the child is not getting enough exposure to outdoor activities or the outdoors. Playing around just ten minutes in the sun can allow a child to absorb their entire recommended daily quota of vitamin D from the sun’s rays.
This is needed for proper growth and for the development of bones in particular. What’s more, when a child plays, especially outdoors, they tend to develop a rather healthy appetite. This, in turn, helps in encouraging the child to eat healthily and enjoy a varied diet that is essential for the proper growth and development of the body.
Accidents in childhood
No matter how careful one is with their children, things are not always in one’s control, especially when dealing with toddlers. During the early years of development, a child is bound to bump into things, fall down, and sometimes even get bruised and cut, while learning to walk and deal with their surroundings. Of course, unfortunately, there are even times when things get out of hand and the child actually ends up with a fracture.
If this fracture is not taken care of properly, this simple accident could prove expensive as the child develops and the broken bone starts growing with an incorrect direction and shape. If left unattended, this child could end up with bow legs as an adult, just because the bone once broken was not treated properly and lacked proper medical attention!