In the earlier pages of this article you read that somehow the combination of the collagen and proteoglycans leads to a negative electrical charge that attracts water into the nucleus.
Allow me to go one step deeper and end up with a golden nugget you can apply today to jumpstart the natural healing of your bulging discs!
The combination of collagen & proteoglycans contains glycosaminoglycans which act as the substance that will hold the water through a mechanism based on osmotic pressure.
I know, I know, this needs some explaining, relax, it is not so difficult to understand.
And once you get this, you’ll understand another simple thing you can do each day to help your discs! It sounds complex, but the actionable conclusion is simple…
Wikipedia says: “Osmosis is the movement of solvent molecules through a selectively permeable membrane into a region of higher solute concentration, aiming to equalize the solute concentrations on the two sides. It may also be used to describe a physical process in which any solvent moves, without input of energy, across a semipermeable membrane (permeable to the solvent, but not the solute) separating two solutions of different concentrations. Although osmosis does not require input of energy, it does use kinetic energy and can be made to do work.”
“In order to visualize this effect, imagine a U-shaped clear tube with equal amounts of water on each side, separated by a membrane at its base that is impermeable to sugar molecules (made from dialysis tubing). Sugar has been added to the water on one side. The height of the water on each side will change proportional to the pressure of the solutions.
Osmotic pressure causes the height of the water in the compartment containing the sugar to rise, due to movement of the pure water from its compartment into the compartment containing the sugar water. This process will stop once the pressures of the water and sugar water toward both sides of the membrane are equated.”
OK, now what does this all mean for you and your discs?
SIMPLE: your disc’s nucleus sucks in water because of it’s negative charge through osmosis.
And this process is partly driven by kinetic energy, which means movement – so you must move! Because your moving around enhances the metabolism of your intervertebral discs.
This is such an important thing to understand that I will try to explain it once more in the next article of this serie: The essence of the metabolism of your intervertebral discs.
