One of the latest and surprising findings in the field of physical therapy is that slouching is not as bad as we think it is. Certain researchers have gone so far as to say that the conventional fear mongering regarding poor posture can actually be more harmful than slouching itself. Undoing over a century’s worth of public health messaging about the evils of poor posture, let alone the custom of elders telling youngsters to "sit up straight," will be a monumental task.
I know because I've spent the better part of a decade researching the so-called "poor posture epidemic" of the 20th century, studying the myriad ways in which posture panic has become part of the fabric of our everyday lives. What I have found is that some of our most cherished beliefs about posture health are unexamined remnants of cultural and political concerns from the past.
At the turn of the century, the idea that poor posture posed a serious population-wide health threat became entrenched in American public and popular health culture, thanks in part to the then-burgeoning fields of evolutionary medicine and paleoanthropology. Applying the theories of Charles Darwin to medical practice, early posture advocates such as Jessie H. Bancroft, R. Tait McKenzie and Eliza M. Mosher—founders of the American Posture League –began to argue that without proper preventative health treatment, bipedalism might actually be an inherent weakness to human functioning, causing organ prolapses and other musculoskeletal problems not found among quadrupedal non-human animals.
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