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Top Chiropractic and Acupuncture, 1008 Victoria Road West Ryde, Sydney (2026)

17/09/2026

While I was posting the Homo Sedentarius series, E.T. actually came to mind—and the similarities are more than just a little striking. 👇

Steven Spielberg's 1982 masterpiece gave us one of the most iconic characters in cinema history — a being from another world, stranded on Earth, desperate to go home.

But look at E.T. again through a different lens.

Enlarged head. Enormous eyes. Long, precise fingers. Short, thin legs clearly not built for running. A spine that never fully straightens. Frail, atrophied limbs. Pale skin that suggests a life lived far from sunlight.

Now look at the image of Homo Sedentarius — the scientific projection of what humans may evolve toward if the sedentary lifestyle continues across thousands of generations.

They are almost the same being.

This is not a coincidence. And it may not have been accidental.

In 1893 — 89 years before E.T. appeared on screen — H.G. Wells wrote an essay called "The Man of the Year Million." In it, he predicted that the humans of the distant future would have enormous brains, huge eyes adapted to artificial light, long delicate fingers for fine manipulation, and small, weak, vestigial bodies. Legs and muscles made redundant by technology. A being of pure intelligence housed in a body that had simply stopped being used.

Wells was writing satire. But he was drawing on the same evolutionary logic that scientists use today.

Spielberg's creative team — whether consciously or not — reached into that same tradition when they designed E.T. The physical form of a being whose intelligence vastly outpaced its physicality. A creature that clearly evolved in a world where the body was no longer the primary survival tool.

Here is what I find remarkable.

We don't need 10,000 years or another planet.

I see the early version of Homo Sedentarius — of E.T. — in my clinic every single week.

The forward head that no longer sits over the shoulders. The glutes that have forgotten how to fire. The hip flexors permanently shortened from decades of sitting. The cervical curve flattened by years of screen time. The disc dehydrated from sustained compression with no movement to cycle it back to life.

The body is already moving in the direction that artists have been imagining for over a century.

H.G. Wells saw it in 1893.
Spielberg felt it in 1982.
I see it on my examination table in 2026.

The question Wells was really asking — the question Spielberg was really asking — is what happens to a body that stops being used.

The answer has not changed in 130 years.

It becomes something we would no longer recognise as fully human.

Move. Load your body. Use what evolution spent 200,000 years building for you.

Before it decides you don't need it anymore.

This is part of the ongoing Homo Sedentarius series — exploring what sedentary life is doing to the human body through science, culture and clinical reality.

— Dr Don
TOP Chiropractic Acupuncture · West Ryde
📞 02 8937 0171 · topchiro.com.au

13/09/2026

First half marathon done. 21km. 2 hours flat. 🏃‍♂️
I wasn't sure I'd make it under 2 hours. Honestly wasn't sure until I crossed the line.
A year ago I couldn't run 1km without gasping for air. 6:30 pace and I was done. Today I ran 21km at 5:37 pace without stopping. That's a different person.
Running beside me was Lucas — someone I've known for years, first as a patient and practitioner, now one of my training partner. we had a lot more in common, acupuncturist himself. We started training together, then it was bike rides, swims, trail runs, triathlon events. We've exchanged treatments up through a few training injuries along the way and kept each other moving.
Today was our first half marathon event together. Felt right that we crossed it together.
There's something about endurance sport that's hard to explain to people who haven't done it. It's not really about the race. It's about who you become through the training — the early mornings, the sessions when your body says no and you go anyway, the slow compounding of effort over months and years.
I started running because I believed in what movement does to the body. Now I run because I genuinely love it.
Proud of today. Proud of the journey that got here.
On to the next one. 💪

12/09/2026

📱 PART 5 — Can We Reverse It?

Homo Sedentarius — Part 5 of 5

We started this series with a disturbing image.

A future human — enlarged head, long fingers, short thin legs, permanently slouched spine — sitting in a chair, scrolling a screen, having forgotten what standing felt like.

Homo Sedentarius.

Over the last four posts we've covered the evolutionary biology of how sedentary lifestyles reshape the body across generations. The Dutch case showing how fast the body responds to environmental pressure. The mismatch hypothesis explaining why our 200,000-year-old hardware is struggling in a 200-year-old environment. And the cellular mechanisms by which movement keeps the spine alive — and stillness quietly destroys it.

So the final question: can we actually reverse this?

Yes. With an important qualification.

The body's capacity for recovery is extraordinary — but it is not unlimited, and it is not automatic. It requires the right inputs, at the right time, with enough consistency to signal to the system that the environment has changed.

Here is what the evidence actually supports:

Move before you're in pain.
The single most effective thing you can do for your long-term spinal health is not a specific exercise. It is consistent, daily movement that loads your spine and joints through varied ranges. Walking remains the most evidence-backed intervention for spinal health across every age group. It is free, it requires no equipment, and it is what your body has been waiting for.

Break sitting every 30 minutes.
You do not need to stand all day. You need to interrupt the sustained compressive load that sitting places on your discs. Standing up, walking to the kitchen, doing five shoulder rolls — each of these resets the disc imbibition cycle and reactivates the deep stabilisers. Set an alarm if you have to.

Load your posterior chain.
Your glutes, hamstrings and lower back stabilisers evolved to bear load. If they are not being loaded — through walking, hiking, resistance training, sport — they will progressively weaken. Gluteal amnesia is not permanent, but reversing it requires deliberate loading. Squats, hip hinges, walking uphill, climbing stairs. These are not optional additions to health. They are maintenance.

Get your spine assessed.
If degeneration, restriction or disc pathology is already present, moving blindly can sometimes aggravate rather than help. Knowing exactly what is happening in your spine — which joints are restricted, which discs are under load, which muscles have disengaged — means you can move smarter, not just harder.

This is what I do at TOP Chiropractic Acupuncture. I assess what is actually happening in your spine and nervous system, identify the specific restrictions and dysfunctions present, and build a plan that addresses them directly — through chiropractic care, acupuncture, and targeted rehabilitation.

The goal is never to keep you coming in forever. The goal is to get your spine moving, build your resilience, and give you the tools to maintain it yourself.

Homo Sedentarius is a warning, not a prophecy.

You have the same body as a hunter-gatherer. You just need to use it like one.

If you've been putting off doing something about your spine — this is the sign.

📍 TOP Chiropractic Acupuncture
1008 Victoria Road, West Ryde NSW 2114
📞 02 8937 0171
🌐 topchiro.com.au
New patients always welcome.

— Dr Don

10/09/2026

Homo Sedentarius — Part 4 of 5

Movement is not exercise.

That distinction matters more than almost anything I tell my patients.

Exercise is a structured activity you do for 30–60 minutes. Movement is what your body requires — continuously, throughout the day — to function as it was designed.

You can go to the gym every morning and still be destroying your spine by sitting for the remaining 9 hours. The research is unambiguous on this: prolonged sitting causes measurable spinal damage regardless of whether you exercised that morning.

Here is what is actually happening inside your spine and nervous system when you move — and when you don't.

When you move:

Every spinal joint contains synovial fluid — a lubricant produced in response to movement. Joint motion compresses and releases the cartilage surfaces, pumping this fluid through the tissue and delivering the nutrients that keep cartilage healthy. No movement. No pump. No nutrients. Cartilage begins to thin.

Your spinal discs have no direct blood supply. They receive water and nutrients through a process called imbibition — the disc absorbs fluid from surrounding tissue when load is applied and released through movement. Walking, changing position, bending — each of these cycles fluid through the disc, keeping it hydrated and resilient. Sustained sitting applies constant compressive load with no cycling. The disc dehydrates.

Your deep spinal stabilisers — the multifidus and transversus abdominis — are reflexively activated by movement and position changes. They switch on automatically when you walk, stand, change direction. In sustained sitting they are not required and progressively disengage. Over years, they atrophy.

Your nervous system receives proprioceptive input — positional and movement information — from mechanoreceptors in every joint, muscle and ligament. This input is constant during movement and minimal during sustained stillness. A spine that doesn't move provides the brain with less information about where it is in space. The result is reduced coordination, altered movement patterns and increased injury risk.

When you don't move:

Intradiscal pressure increases and stays elevated. Disc height reduces across the day. The posterior annular fibres — the most vulnerable part of the disc — bear sustained load without the decompression cycle that movement provides. This is the cellular mechanism behind the disc injuries I treat every week.

Joint capsules thicken with disuse. Collagen fibres within the capsule lay down in disorganised patterns. The joint becomes stiffer. The stiffness reduces movement. The reduced movement produces more stiffness. The cycle accelerates.

The nervous system downregulates its sensitivity to the joint — the brain receives less feedback and loses fine motor control over that region. This is partly why people with chronic back pain have measurably reduced proprioception in the lumbar spine.

This is what Homo Sedentarius is building — not through dramatic injury but through the quiet, daily, cellular accumulation of not moving.

The reversal is equally cellular. Movement — any movement — begins to reverse these processes almost immediately. Synovial fluid begins circulating within minutes of joint motion. Disc imbibition recommences with positional change. Proprioceptive input returns with loading.

Your body is ready to recover. It is waiting for the signal.

Next — and last — Part 5: Can we actually reverse this? The clinical answer, and what you can do starting today.

— Dr Don
TOP Chiropractic Acupuncture · West Ryde
📞 02 8937 0171 · topchiro.com.au

06/09/2026

📱 PART 3 — The Mismatch Hypothesis

Homo Sedentarius — Part 3 of 5

Your body was designed approximately 200,000 years ago.

It has not been updated since.

The hardware running your spine, your metabolism, your cardiovascular system and your musculoskeletal structure was built for a human who walked 15–20km per day, carried loads, squatted to rest, climbed, threw, lifted and occasionally ran for their life.

That human has not existed in most of the developed world for roughly 200 years.

Evolutionary biologists call this the Mismatch Hypothesis — and it is one of the most important ideas in modern medicine.

The concept is simple: when an organism's environment changes faster than evolution can adapt to it, the organism suffers. Not because anything is broken. But because a system optimised for one environment is now operating in a completely different one.

Your body is not malfunctioning. It is functioning exactly as designed — in an environment it was never designed for.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

Your spine evolved its S-curve to distribute load during upright walking and running. Sitting for 8 hours collapses that curve, increases intradiscal pressure, deactivates the stabilising muscles and compresses the facet joints. The spine is not failing. It is responding normally to an abnormal load.

Your glutes evolved to be the largest muscles in the human body specifically for bipedal locomotion. Sitting switches them off completely. Researchers call the result "gluteal amnesia" — the glutes literally forget how to fire. After years of inactivity, the surrounding muscles compensate, the pelvis tilts, the lower back bears load it was never designed to bear alone.

Your hip flexors evolved to alternate between contraction and full extension with every walking stride. Sitting holds them in constant contraction for hours. Over time they shorten, stiffen, and pull the pelvis into an anterior tilt that loads the lumbar spine unevenly.

Your cardiovascular and metabolic system evolved to process glucose and fatty acids through constant muscular activity. Sustained sitting switches off the enzyme systems responsible for this processing within 20 minutes. Blood sugar and triglycerides accumulate. The system designed for a hunter-gatherer becomes the system producing type 2 diabetes in an office worker.

None of this is disease. It is mismatch.

And here is the part that should give you hope.

Hunter-gatherers who still live traditional lifestyles show almost none of these conditions. Not because they have different bodies to us — they have identical hardware. But because they use it the way it was designed to be used.

The solution is not complicated. It does not require a gym membership or a perfect diet or a standing desk.

It requires movement. Regular, varied, load-bearing movement. The kind your body has been expecting for 200,000 years and has been waiting for you to give it.

01/09/2026

📱 PART 2 — The Dutch Paradox

Homo Sedentarius — Part 2 of 5

150 years ago, the Dutch were among the shortest people in Europe. Today they're the tallest nation on earth — averaging 183cm for adult men.

No geographical reason. No climate change. The land is flat and wet and has been for centuries.

So what happened?

Three things — and every single one of them is relevant to your health right now.

1. They drank milk like water

The Netherlands is a nation built on dairy farming. Canals, not mountains. Cows, not crops. Every child grew up consuming extraordinary quantities of calcium, protein and IGF-1 — the growth factor in dairy that signals the body to build. Generation after generation, Dutch children reached the absolute genetic ceiling their DNA allowed.

2. They built the most equal society in Europe

Height isn't just about food. It's about whether your body can direct energy toward growth rather than fighting infection. The Netherlands built world-class universal healthcare in the 19th century — before almost anyone else. Every child — rich or poor — grew up without major illness consuming their developmental energy. The result: a population that expressed its full genetic potential, consistently, across every income level.

3. Tall men had more children

This is where it gets fascinating. Research from the London School of Economics found that in the Netherlands — uniquely — tall men consistently had more children than short men. Not because women consciously selected for height, but because of social and cultural patterns that reinforced it across generations.

Four to five generations of tall men having more children. The maths is straightforward: the genes for height became dominant in the Dutch population faster than almost any documented case in human history.

Here's the clinical point.

The Dutch case proves something that evolutionary biologists call phenotypic plasticity — the body's extraordinary capacity to change within a single lifetime and across generations in response to environment, nutrition and culture.

Your spine, your muscles, your metabolism — they are not fixed. They are responding to exactly the environment you put them in. Every day.

The Dutch got taller because their environment demanded it and rewarded it.

Your body is getting stiffer, weaker and more compressed because your environment is demanding that too.

Our environment now demands we sit more and move less. Desk work, phones, screens — everything is designed for stillness. Your body wasn't. Stand up. Move. Load it the way evolution intended.

26/08/2026

Meet Homo Sedentarius. This might be us — in 10,000 years. 👇

Scientists and evolutionary biologists have a fascinating — and uncomfortable — theory about where the sedentary lifestyle is taking the human body.

If we continue to sit for 8–10 hours a day across thousands of generations, evolution will do what it always does: adapt us to survive our environment. And the environment we've built is a chair in front of a screen.

Here's what the research suggests could happen:

The spine — currently an elegant S-curve designed for upright walking and running — may gradually shift toward a C-shape. Forward head posture, rounded upper back and flattened lower back are already the norm in desk workers. Evolution may simply make that permanent.

The legs and glutes — our largest muscles evolved specifically for walking, running and standing. In a world where none of that is required, the glutes switch off (researchers already call this "gluteal amnesia"), and the hip flexors stay permanently shortened. Over generations, the legs may become shorter, thinner and structurally designed for sitting — not standing.

The metabolism — sustained sitting switches off the muscles responsible for processing blood sugar and fat. Future humans may evolve an extremely low metabolic rate — able to survive on minimal energy but prone to the modern diseases we already know: diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease.

The image you're looking at — Homo Sedentarius — shows a being with an enlarged head, long fingers for screen interaction, short thin legs with no need for locomotion, and a permanently slouched spine.

Here's the clinical reality I see in my clinic every single week:

We don't need to wait 10,000 years.

The spine that's been sitting for 8 hours a day for 10 years already looks like a work in progress toward that image. The glutes that haven't fired properly in years. The hip flexors that have forgotten how to lengthen. The cervical curve that's been replaced by forward head posture.

Evolution is slow. But the body adapts faster than we think.

The mismatch hypothesis in evolutionary biology says it plainly: our bodies are still designed for hunters and gatherers — but we're living like the image above. That mismatch is why disc injuries, diabetes, obesity and chronic pain are the defining diseases of our time.

The good news? Unlike evolution — you can change this. Movement is the most powerful medicine available to you. Not a gym membership. Not a special program. Just consistent, regular movement that your body was designed for.

This is Part 1 of a series — The Body We're Building. Next post: what the Dutch figured out about height, evolution and culture that the rest of the world missed — and what it means for how we think about health.

— Dr Don
TOP Chiropractic Acupuncture · West Ryde
📞 02 8937 0171 · topchiro.com.au

12/08/2026

Use it or lose it. I mean this literally. 👇

One of the most common questions I get asked is: "What's the best exercise for my back?"

And my honest answer every time surprises people.

Do whatever you enjoy enough to keep doing.

Walk. Swim. Ride. Run. Garden. Dance. Box. It genuinely doesn't matter what it is. What matters is that your body is moving — regularly, consistently, in ways that take you out of the static positions you've been stuck in all day.

Here's the thing most people don't realise.

The body doesn't deteriorate from being used too much. It deteriorates from not being used enough.

I see this every single week in clinic. Office workers — people who sit for 8+ hours a day — consistently present with more chronic neck pain, lower back pain and degenerative changes than tradies and outdoor workers who are physically active all day. Not because the desk is more dangerous than a building site. But because static positions cause joint lubrication to drop, discs to dehydrate, muscles to switch off, and fibrotic tissue to build up in joints that aren't moving.

Arthritis and degeneration accelerate with stillness — not with use.

When patients ask me about the "optimal" exercise program — I tell them to start with what they love. Enjoy that first. Do it consistently. Then if there are specific gaps — weak glutes, poor thoracic mobility, tight hip flexors — we add targeted rehab exercises on top of that foundation to reinforce what's lacking.

Not instead of the thing you enjoy. On top of it.

Your body was not built to sit still. It was built to move.

So move. In any way that makes you want to keep moving.

📍 TOP Chiropractic Acupuncture · 1008 Victoria Rd, West Ryde
📞 02 8937 0171
🌐 topchiro.com.au

06/08/2026

The $0 exercise that helps restore your neck curve. All you need is a rolled towel. 👇

Most people who sit at a desk all day, drive for work, or spend time on their phone have lost the natural curve in their neck — their cervical lordosis. Most of them don't know it's happening until the pain starts.

Here's why it matters.

Your cervical spine is designed to have a gentle inward curve. That curve distributes load evenly across your discs — especially at C5-6 and C6-7, the two most clinically significant levels. When the curve flattens or reverses from sustained forward head posture, intradiscal pressure rises sharply at exactly those levels. Over time — disc wear, nerve irritation, headaches and neck pain follow.

The rolled towel technique:

Roll a bath towel to about 8-10cm diameter. Lie flat on a firm surface. Place the roll under the base of your skull and upper neck. Let your head gently fall back. Relax completely for 10–20 minutes. Once daily — ideally in the evening.

That's it. Cadaveric and biomechanical research confirms that cervical extension postures consistently reduce intradiscal pressure at C5-6 and C6-7. You're literally offloading your most vulnerable discs while watching TV.

⚠️ Important: if you have arm pain, pins and needles or numbness — come in for assessment before trying this. It's not appropriate for acute disc herniation with radiculopathy.

If any of the signs in this card sound familiar — your neck has been telling you something. Come in and let's take a proper look. 👇

📍 TOP Chiropractic Acupuncture · 1008 Victoria Rd, West Ryde
📞 02 8937 0171
🌐 www.topchiro.com.au

03/06/2026

Something I see almost every single day in the clinic. 👇
A patient sits down. I ask where the pain is — and they point to their head. Behind the eyes. Sometimes the temples. Usually by the afternoon.
They've tried paracetamol. More water. Less screen time. It keeps coming back.
Here's what most of them don't realise until I show them on examination:
The headache isn't starting in the head. It's starting in the neck.
There's a specific type of headache called a cervicogenic headache — the joints, muscles and nerves in your upper neck refer pain directly into your skull. It can feel like pressure behind the eyes, tension across the forehead, or a dull ache on one side.
If you sit at a desk for most of the day — your neck is almost certainly contributing.
The giveaway signs:
👉 Headache that builds through the day
👉 Stiffness or tenderness at the base of your skull
👉 Pain that's worse on one side
👉 Headaches that come with neck tightness
This type of headache responds really well to chiropractic care and acupuncture. Both together work faster than either alone.
If this sounds familiar and you've just been putting up with it — come in and let's take a proper look. You don't have to just manage it.
📍 TOP Chiropractic Acupuncture · 1008 Victoria Rd, West Ryde
📞 02 8937 0171
🌐 www.topchiro.com.au

Top Chiropractic and Acupuncture

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