by Cruxx » Wed Feb 25, 2015 2:15 pm
The most common cause of intense back pain is a pinched nerve, which gets a squeeze whenever the muscles adjoining it tighten. Being a nerve, it immediately lets out a shriek of protest, a protest which is eloquently spoken in the unambiguous language of pain.
And where is this noisy nerve ?
Normally, it runs amongst the muscles adjoining the spine, in a flexible conduit.
These adjoining muscles shape the spine, be it at rest or in movement.
But sudden movement, especially when it involves lifting or twisting, can rupture the conduit and extrude the nerve out between the muscles.
Because the spine is shaped, positioned and held erect by its adjoining muscles, these muscles are normally in some degree of tension – because that is how they work, by contracting, by pulling between two anchor points.
Of course, the quick and sure remedy for this kind of back pain is to replace the prodigal nerve back into the conduit that accommodates it, where it soon recovers from the compression and abrasion that it suffered.
Refitting the distressed nerve into its conduit is done by specific deep tissue manipulation that is not in common practice.
One can deduce that neither doctors of medicine nor chiropractors properly understand this remedy for back pain. The evidence is explicit in their respective treatments.
The doctor prescribes an anti-inflammatory and hopes it will go away. If the pain persists beyond three months, the diagnosis typically becomes that of a displaced disc, which the patient is advised they will have to live with for the remainder of their days. Yes, it can be remedied by an expensive surgical procedure, but the prognosis entails the risk of making the pain worse in nearly half of surgical outcomes.
On the other hand, the chiropractor advises that the cause of their back pain is some form of spinal misalignment, and that an appointment twice a week for the next 3 months will put it right.
How do I know this ? I have been fixing back pain for 13 years as a practicioner of therapeutic massage.
Often, the client comes for massage in the hope that it may ease the pain a little, and it is a deeply emotional moment when they descend from the table to discover that the bane of their life has disappeared. And they tell me their story, which typically runs that a doctor has given them the unpalatable advice that their spine is permanently damaged.
So they paid a chiropractor . . . and now they are in tears at the horror of having trusted those who peddle orthodoxies, and at counting the years they endured pain as their merciless companion.
Mind you, there are practitioners out there that often succeed in treating back pain. And all practitioners have some successes. Sometimes the pain does simply go away, and sometimes the spine is indeed irreparably damaged (these relatively rare cases justify the doctors’ orthodoxy). Similarly, successful cases suggest to the chiropractor that the principles of their practice do indeed work. Remedial masseurs often have a respectable success rate.
And then there are the intrepid individuals who look beyond the popular wisdom in the brave hope that some new knowledge will bring great benefit.
This ability to fix chronic back pain within a single session had its origins in the practice and understanding of Sacred Bodywork, a tradition which ostensibly can be traced back thousands of years to Persia, yet which remains virtually unknown in the mind of mankind.
The strangest thing of all is that, up until the time of writing this article in 2010, no practitioner (neither medical, nor chiropractic, nor masseur) has ever asked how I fixed their intractable client. Never. Not once.
Paradox is where thinking gets most interesting.