Empowerment lessons from the factory floor

When Brian Utting held a ceremony to mark the closing of his massage school (my alma mater), among the many speakers was Hank Queen. I didn't know anything about Hank at the time, but I was very taken with a story he told about "shiny eyes."

The story went something like this. Hank was the director of a large manufacturing group at Boeing, which was struggling in the aftermath of 9/11. Orders were down as the airline industry reeled. Employee morale and productivity at Boeing were low and getting worse. Hank and his management team decide to bring in a high-powered business consultant from Japan to help address the issue. Boeing flew the consultant over at great expense, and Hank and his team immediately took him to the factory floor. After only a few minutes, the consultant turned to Hank and said, "I can't help these people. They don't have shiny eyes."

What is going on with Seattle's shoulders? I received two calls this morning from patients with recent shoulder injuries, and I have treated at least four other people for similar conditions in the past week.

It's not unusual to have people lined up outside my office with shoulder pain around the holidays. Plane, train, and automobile travel takes its toll on shoulders and necks, and hide-a-beds and cots rough up holiday travelers even more. But I've never before seen a spate of shoulder problems like this in February.

I truly hope that you're not having any shoulder pain, but if you're in Seattle and your shoulder is bothering you, give me a shout. My clinical skills have been well honed by a couple hundred hours of orthopedic massage classes and hundreds of hours of clinical practice.

It's a sunny morning in Seattle, so I am sitting in front of a wide open window in nothing but running shorts, enjoying a nice blast of sunshine, appreciating its warmth and contemplating the natural Vitamin D that it's creating in my body.

Since I'm such a health nerd, I feel the need to label this, and luckily there's already a word for it - heliotherapy (helio means "sun").

This reminds me of a photo I saw years ago in National Geographic of residents of Moscow standing against a brick wall in sub-zero winter weather throwing open their heavy coats to reveal their shorts and swim suits underneath.

For you office rats in the Sunbelt, this may sound a little pathetic, but for the northern office rat, especially here in the Great Northwest (or, as my cousin calls it, the "Grey Northwet"), we have to grab our sunshine when we can.