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Instinctive Sleeping and Resting Postures (2000)

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Re: Instinctive Sleeping and Resting Postures (2000)

#121

Post by throwway120385 »

helboi4 wrote: post #45
kijin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pillow doesn't need to be a factory-made product that you buy at a store. Plenty of humans make pillows out of natural objects when sleeping outdoors. I can totally imagine a mountain gorilla using a chunk of wood, or even a body part of another gorilla, as a "pillow" if it makes them feel more comfortable.

Yeah im sure there are many tribespeople with pillows. It feels wierdly racist that this guy is acting like people in societies like this just live instinctually like gorillas and don't actually have the universal human trait of creating and relying on manmade tools.

The thing that makes it not racist for me is that he's clearly trying to point out that, as primates, in non-Western surroundings and when not socialized to prefer soft beds with fluffy pillows we tend to adopt similar sleeping positions as other primates do. It would be very racist if he had adopted a sneering "look at the lowly primitives" tone, but he's trying to show that these sleeping positions have helped him immensely and he's suggesting that we might research sleep positioning more as there seem to be differences in the two populations under comparison.

You can look at the COVID pandemic for an example of how body positioning has helped change how well people can breathe. Proning of severely sick patients substantially improved outcomes. That's literally just rolling the patient from their back to their stomach. So there might be something interesting there that we can learn if we pay attention. And he's trying to say "we can learn something from these people if only we pay attention."

Re: Instinctive Sleeping and Resting Postures (2000)

#122

Post by kaitai »

hnbad wrote: post #81

It's odd that the paper goes to great lengths to talk about protecting your penis from insects but at the same point seems to ignore women completely - all the illustrations depict men. Having met women (shocking, I know), bust size can be a significant factor in ergonomics so it would be interesting to see how that factors into it. Also anecdotally, pregnant belly-sleepers frequently rely on cushioning and people ma…

Yes, I wondered about this as well. I understand why the author might not have observed women sleeping, and certainly wouldn't have photos, but one might at least mention it (especially given all the attention to the penis). Bust size & placement for sure has a significant effect on where arms can be placed, among other things.

It seems that the author's observations are primarily from various camping-equivalents, more so than home life.

To my sibling commenter, whether pregnancy is or isn't "healthy" isn't quite the point, IMO. Various stages of pregnancy do occupy a non-trivial part of many people's lifespan and significantly change the ergonomics of sleep. Given that humans have been getting pregnant for a long time, it is a big miss to not even mention that it hasn't been considered. Academic training tries to impress on most authors that they should mention what they're ignoring and why, not least to set up the citation train for the future and support grant applications.

Re: Instinctive Sleeping and Resting Postures (2000)

#124

Post by karaterobot »

I notice that all of the sleep positions are either on the stomach or side. I usually go between side and stomach when sleeping, and can't really fall asleep very well on my back. But, my impression is that most people go between side and back, with stomach sleepers being a minority (I've even heard it called weird).

This study backs that up (54% side, 37% back, 7% stomach)

https://www.dovepress.com/sleep-positions-and-nocturnal-body...

I wonder if the difference is cultural, or technological: that is, do we learn to sleep a certain way, or is it that the mattress changes the equation somehow and makes people 5x more likely to sleep on their back than on their stomach?

In the past, I've hypothesized that it's cultural, and my just-so etiology for the phenomenon is that it comes from TV and movies. It's much easier to get a good shot of an actor delivering dialog while lying in bed on their back, compared to their stomach, so we see people sleeping on their back and learn to do it that way.

This is all just uninformed speculation, and of course it assumes the original, linked article is valid at all.

Re: Instinctive Sleeping and Resting Postures (2000)

#125

Post by talonx »

danjc wrote: post #123
talonx wrote: post #8

Very interesting. The author of the paper is around, at least according to the internet, at 90+ years of age and still practising physiotherapy.

Also thought that but the article is dated 2000.

Yes, but there is a report of him being around around 2022 also - https://web.archive.org/web/20220128114020/https://whyy.org/...

Re: Instinctive Sleeping and Resting Postures (2000)

#126

Post by whalabi »

FredrikMeyer wrote: post #7

I find this article quite insubstantial. He lists alternative sleeping positions, but no sources backing up the claim that "western sleeping positions" (whatever that is) are worse. Also only one citation, and that is to back up the claim that there are 200 primates. Nice pictures though - I feel happy that I can sit (relatively) comfortably in the squatting position (as an European).

Yeah I had the same response. He makes lots of anecdotal claims about tribespeople's back trouble but where's the data? It's mildly interesting nonetheless.

Re: Instinctive Sleeping and Resting Postures (2000)

#127

Post by IncreasePosts »

FredrikMeyer wrote: post #7

I find this article quite insubstantial. He lists alternative sleeping positions, but no sources backing up the claim that "western sleeping positions" (whatever that is) are worse. Also only one citation, and that is to back up the claim that there are 200 primates. Nice pictures though - I feel happy that I can sit (relatively) comfortably in the squatting position (as an European).

There's also so much talk about penis protection, I would love to know if women use different sleeping positions at different rates than men

Re: Instinctive Sleeping and Resting Postures (2000)

#128

Post by WaitWaitWha »

I am very uncomfortable with this paper to be called scientific research. It certainly appears the author had extensive life experiences, but does not demonstrate any of the data he collected.

> If you are a medical professional and have been trained in a “civilised” country you probably know next to nothing about the primate Homo sapiens and how they survive in the wild.

Starting off by insulting an entire population and making assumptions about what they do or do not know is odd. The disrespect continues on how an entire medical field "do not know that nature has provided". The author continues on to further disrespect by moving medical professionals in to "so called civilised people", and makes medical conclusions of "suffer[ing] unnecessarily from musculoskeletal problems".

And, this is just in the first paragraph. The second paragraph goes into the author's background how he lived amongst tribal people, commanded a platoon of African soldiers, and organized expeditions to meet native peoples and study their sleeping and resting postures.

> I tried to carry out surveys to collect evidence but they were meaningless

The author collected evidence, and the evidence was meaningless (alternative hypothesis false?) so... he discarded it? Would it not make sense to attach it and explain why it was meaningless?

One of the conclusions is

> Forest dwellers and nomads suffer fewer musculoskeletal lesions

but then...

> Arabs in the Sahara will sit in the position shown

How is the Arabs in the Sahara backing up forest dwellers conclusion?

NIH publishing this is odd. At least it was not written by ChatGPT.

Re: Instinctive Sleeping and Resting Postures (2000)

#129

Post by sandspar »

FredrikMeyer wrote: post #7

I find this article quite insubstantial. He lists alternative sleeping positions, but no sources backing up the claim that "western sleeping positions" (whatever that is) are worse. Also only one citation, and that is to back up the claim that there are 200 primates. Nice pictures though - I feel happy that I can sit (relatively) comfortably in the squatting position (as an European).

I'm not saying it's an either/or choice, but I'd rather trust articles written by obsessed old dude experts rather than articles written by "publish or perish" academics citing 100 other p-hacked "publish or perish" articles.

Re: Instinctive Sleeping and Resting Postures (2000)

#130

Post by safety1st »

kqr wrote: post #86
anentropic wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think it's exactly this. A lot of people end up thinking it's about ergonomic chairs. An un-ergonomic chair will make things bad pretty quick, but supportive ergonomic chairs are part of the long term problem IMHO. And deadlifts are not the only solution. I started out using just a backless stool and it helped a bit (can't slouch!), but what really sorted me out was using the "lumbar machine" at the gym for a…

> A lot of people end up thinking it's about ergonomic chairs. An un-ergonomic chair will make things bad pretty quick I'm still fairly young so I probably shouldn't be so quick to say – maybe I'll have to eat my hat in the next decade or two – but I feel like this is also one of those "it's not the thing but how you use it" type situations. I have always used un-ergonomic fairly spartan wood chairs and stools withou…

That might help to some degree, but I bet actually exercising your back muscles regularly will have a larger effect.

I mean I'm sure of it. It seems like common sense we've forgotten. Stress the muscles, eat a generous amount of protein, they will grow and get stronger. Do stuff that doesn't stress them as much, they will stay weak and that will lead to complications.

Similar to how the discussion around obesity has become so complicated, in a country where the #1 cause of death is heart disease. It is not complicated, obesity leads to heart disease, to reduce your risk, you must become less obese. Yet we insist on complicating the topic.

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