Wednesday, May 6, 2009

A “Cracking” Good Time (sorry it’s so long)

My wife and I recently went to a Home and health fair. Among the other exhibits that were there, we ran into a booth where a friend of ours had set up his Chiropractic table. He was doing scan of the spinal cord. He was using some sort of hand held ultra-sound scanner that showed if the spine was out of alignment or not. My wife wanted to have it done, since she has had back pain for many years. When he scanned her back, she had several places where her spine was mis-aligned. Another friend, who was with us, also had her back scanned, then, I had mine done. I knew I was having a little problem with my back, because I pinched a nerve in my lower back almost two years ago. He told me that my back scan would be the best he would do all day, but that he still wanted to see me to help get rid of the pinched nerve.

When we went in to his office, he began slowly, only making mild adjustments the first couple of days. After a week, he decided he wanted to x-ray my wife’s back to see what was going on. When my wife was in college, she had a roommate who offered to walk on everyone’s back. My wife let her, and that is when her back pain started. That was over twenty years ago. His x-rays showed that when that girl walked on my wife’s back, she had caused a twisting, greenstick type fracture of my wife’s back. Three of her vertebrae were twisted out of alignment, and fused together by arthritis. Several of her ribs had been separated from the backbone, and this was why she had been having pain. He told her he wanted to take her treatment slowly, because he was afraid if he broke those vertebrae loose from each other and the arthritis holding them together, she would really be in pain. He said he wanted to loosen things up a little and see if he could get the vertebrae above and below the fused mass to move. He took a spring-loaded device and thumped around the area, then did an adjustment centering on the area just below her fused vertebrae. A shocked look came on his face. “I just broke all of them loose.” Since then, he has been working to get her back to except the new alignment. She has had a little pain, but nothing like before, and now her back is beginning to feel normal for the first time in years.

As for me, every time he tries to adjust my back, he complains about the fact that my back is too strong. He says he cannot get anything to move the way he wants it to. He finally decided to resort to what I will call “THE RACK”. This is similar in concept to the medieval torture device of the same name, with only minor differences. They put a harness around your hips, and another around your rib cage. One harness is hooked to one end of the table; the other is hooked to a motorized pulley system that will automatically pull at a preset weight. He normally starts people out at around 50-60 lbs. of weight. He started me at 100. He said he didn’t want to hurt me. When the weight started pulling, I spoke up from the table. I told him, “You’ll have to do better than this. The next visit, he went to 120 with the same results. On Monday, he told me, “They say I can go to 150 without pulling your spine apart. Today we’ll do 135.” For the first time, I actually felt like something was happening, and I can now tell that something moved. He has me stretching, and doing some other exercises, and on Monday, he is going to go to 145 or 150. It will be the most weight he has ever had to put on anyone.

All I can say is, I hope it works.

Get Crackin’. Stick.

4 comments:

Delirious said...

Yikes! Be careful!

But I am glad that he is able to help your wife! That must be so wonderful to finally get help!

Amber said...

okay i must admit that rack thing sounds scary - I'm glad A's back is feeling better though, a good lesson to never let anyone walk on your back!

Inklings said...

That is a pretty scary story! No one is ever going to walk on my back, at least not with my permission.

Nene said...

Be careful - you may have a high pain tolerance and it could do damage before you realize it is hurting you. I keep wondering if I should go to a chiropractor. My lower back is messed up and when my orthopedic surgeon looked at it one day, he said my spine was all twisted. :0+