Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

NNSL (Apr 23/99) - Sometimes when Inuvik Regional Hospital staff physiotherapist Amy Gordon asks patients how they injured themselves, they do not want to tell.

"A lot hurt themselves falling," she says.

"But they don't want to say, 'I slipped on the ice outside the Trapper.'"

She says Graham Riske, the hospital's regional physiotherapist, told of one woman in the south who reluctantly revealed she was playing golf when a protective mother duck rammed its beak into her leg, breaking a bone.

Most injuries, however, are more mundane and result from not leading an active lifestyle.

"My advice is to be as active as possible every day even if that means walking instead of taking a cab," she says.

"Even if you can't walk the whole way, walk half the way and take a cab. It's lifestyle choices -- walking up and down the stairs an extra few times instead of the one time it might take to get to your office. Things like that."

She urges those who sit for long periods to get up and walk around a bit or swivel their torso from side to side.

Other simple exercises include squeezing your shoulder blades together for five seconds or so.

"People could basically move their neck in every direction it goes -- holding it for 10 seconds or so, tilting and rotating and looking up or looking down," the 25-year-old says.

"It's my belief that human beings, like other animals, are meant to be moving around."

Instead of buying expensive orthopaedic back rests, Gordon urges people with back pain to first roll up a towel, place it in the small of their backs, and sit with their hips all the way back in their chairs.

Gordon is urging people to come and ask questions today between 2 and 4 p.m. when the physiotherapy unit holds its open house to mark National Physiotherapy Week.

Gordon has been in Inuvik for about six months. She arrived from Calgary where most work was in private clinics and she was paid on a per-patient basis, she says.

"I wanted to be in a hospital to spend more time with patients," she says.