Even as a child I had a lot of back pain. I fell over the cracks in the sidewalk and would trip over my own feet. Such is childhood. I would run into doorways. I would be looking right at the glass I was grabbing for but rather than the glass ending up in the center of my grasp I would end up poking it with my fingers and over it would go.
Well some things never change—I still trip over cracks in the sidewalk. I have at least two or three hard falls a year this is not good as we get older—I especially worry about my knees. Knee replacements really do not live up to their advertising hype.
I had encephalitis as a child and thought this eye-hand coordination, visual-motor processing issue was an after effect of that illness. There was a time in my life when I thought doctors new everything and could fix every thing. So as an adult I went to a neurologist. I did a complete battery of neurological tests. The end result was—yes I have inconsistent neurological deficits and there is no fix.
I realized that if I wanted to understand who I am as a body in the mind/body/spirit equation I would have to reason it out for my self. My first step was to choose self-acceptance and stop feeling guilty (left over childhood emotional programming) because I cannot consistently catch a moving target (a ball) or remember tai chi routines.
My approach, as a school psychologist, was to self-diagnosis—what other choice did I have? Diagnosis: adult with a hidden Learning Disability in the area of visual-motor processing. Hidden in the terms that the deficit is not visible to others. The topic of hidden disability and adult learning disability is a topic for another day—but it is a topic that deserves attention and acceptance.
So now I have a label but I do not have an explanation for these clumsy, uncoordinated behaviors. These falls typically leave me with back pain from pinched nerves. Since I am more interested in healing the problem than in drowning myself in liver damaging pain medication, my treatment modalities tend to be massage, physical therapy, and chiropractic.
My clumsy behavior never made sense to me until I learned about the neurological process of proprioception. The position-movement sensation, proprioception, has been described as "muscle sense." It is physiologic feedback mechanisms in which a feedback loop exists where commands are carried from the brain to the muscles and then reports on the muscle's condition are sent in the reverse direction. Afferent information (back to the brain) also comes from other structures including tendons, joints, and skin.
My proprioception deficit tends to put me in the wrong place at the wrong time. My estimate is that my reaction time is two to three seconds off. Typically I am three inches off when moving my body through space and half an inch off when pushing buttons on phone or keyboard. Seemingly this is a very big deal in the act of walking through a doorway or past people in a crowded room. In other words I move faster than I visually process. I say to myself step over that person’s foot and I believe that is what I am doing and then crunch I feel myself stepping on their foot.
My many falls have left me with chronic back pain. Back pain is the second most common neurological ailment in the world — only headache is more common. I choose massage, physical therapy and chiropractic to treat the repeated physical stress and chronic conditions.
I, like many back pain sufferers, often believe that during those periods when the pain disappears that the problem has gone away. But this is not always the case—the cause of the pain does not disappear with the symptoms, and in many instances back pain will recur. If left untreated, most back problems only worsen as time and gravity take their toll on our bodies. After falling hard on my knee and twisting and torqueing my pelvis I have had excruciating lumbar pain for nearly five years. I had sciatic pain shooting through my buttocks and down my leg into my foot. I could walk for about fifteen minutes at a moderate pace but could not tolerate standing after five minutes. I wished I could cry because I thought it might make me feel better. I was starting to feel hopeless, which is not like me. I knew I could not live like this for the next 30 years, in my family people live into their 90s. I refused to picture myself as ready for a wheel chair, when we stop ambulatory movement, walking, we enter into the process of entropy. I honor any other individual’s choice. I just thank God for swimming pools. In the pool I was pain free and could get a work out that maintained my strength and stamina.
I started with physical therapy and back strengthening which created minor improvement but the PT became a treadmill sadist and I felt myself regress. I went to an orthopedic physician who requested I get an MRI. Although, I did have two slightly herniated discs, very slight spinal stenosis, and mild lateral arthritis, I did not meet his criteria for surgery because the pattern of symptoms did not indicate a diagnosis remediable by surgery. I totally respected his response because many people go through back surgery and end up worse off than before. He sent me to pain management for two sets of four spinal facet cortisone injections—no improvement. Pain Management’s next suggestion was a technique where they destroy some of the nerves in your back, a rhizotomy. This is where I said goodbye to traditional medicine.
I was continuing to work with my chiropractor. She asked had I thought about prolotherapy? It is a technique that is meant to strengthen weak, over stretched ligaments, as this seems to be a big part of the problem. I did try prolotherapy and felt 20-30% improvement. My hopeful nature returned completely. I felt I still had not found my complete answer. A friend told me she had cured her sciatica problem with Rolfing. I had heard of Rolfing and knew it was criticized for being painful. But I also knew physical therapists who say no pain no gain and I also knew nothing could be as painful as the aftermath of surgery. My Rolfer was a very encouraging person and I did the complete eleven-session program. She also suggested I integrate Sacral-Occipital Therapy Chiropractic into the treatment plan. I would say I have had another 30% improvement. I still have a tendency to extreme muscle tension as if a muscle in the lumbar region goes into spasm. It is this spasm that is the seat of the pain because if I keep that muscle stretched I have no pain. The next step of my odyssey is to discover if a previous viral infection that I know settled in my low back is in fact the culprit causing the current level of muscle spasm pain.
I did also work with a psychologist and a body energy worker. I am a believer in the mind/body/spirit equation. I address all aspects of the healing of my body, mind, and spirit. I view this odyssey as a life lesson; it took sixty years to get to this point I cannot expect to reverse the damage in six months. The alternative approaches I have chosen have been researched; they are not paid for by health insurance but they should be. Health insurance should pay for therapies that promote health not pain killer medication addiction and physical deterioration.
This is a brief description of Rolfing. Rolfing, A system of deep-tissue massage, also known as Structural Integration, has the ability to dramatically alter a person’s posture and structure. It is estimated that more than one million people have received Rolfing work, many for back pain. Research has shown that Rolfing creates a more efficient use of the muscles, allows the body to conserve energy, and creates more economical and refined patterns of movement. Research also demonstrates that Rolfing significantly reduces chronic stress and changes in the body structure. For example, a study showed that Rolfing significantly reduced the spinal curvature of subjects with lordosis (“swayback”). Rolfing has been gaining popularity in the past few decades as a successful treatment for many types of back pain.
Your back supports your entire body, using a complex interconnecting network of nerves, joints, muscles, tendons and ligaments. All these components are capable of producing pain in back, low back and surrounding areas. Because the back is connected to the rest of your body, it also means that pain in back can be an early warning of underlying conditions elsewhere in your body.
Large nerves that originate in the spine and go to the legs and arms can make pain radiate to the extremities. The pain may be felt in the neck (and might radiate into the arm and hand), in the upper back, or in the low back, (and might radiate into the leg or foot), and may include symptoms other than pain, such as weakness, numbness or tingling.
Rolfing sees the body and its structure as a series of interconnected and inter-related bony segments. As a Rolfer will explain to you, your body is designed to provide internal support for all these segments. Large sections rest on sections below them and provide support for sections that are above them. In this case, the back, especially the lower back, provides internal support for almost all of your body. To understand how Rolfing treatment for the back works, it is important to recognize that the back pain cannot be understood by looking at the back alone. It is crucial to understand that Rolfing will treat the body not as individual parts, but as a whole, so the whole organism realigns.
Dr. Ida Rolf, a pioneer in bodywork, perfected the technique structural integration called Rolfing. According to Dr. Rolf, the traditional idea of standing up straight, shoulders back, stomach in and head high, actually misaligns the spine and deforms the skeleton.
Rolfing operates through a sequence of hands-on manipulation, the Rolfers move the tissue of the back and lower back toward symmetry and balance that the body demands by stretching and moving the tissue. Rolfing is designed to loosen the fascia, resulting in a freedom of muscle movement and the unlearning of bad patterns of muscle strain and misuse, resolving the source of the back pain. This release should then enable the back to properly align itself. When the back is properly aligned, back pain should recede.
For low back pain as well as disk herniation, Rolfing would focus on softening, releasing, and lengthening the muscle tissue and creating space between the intervertebral disks (most easily seen when Rolfing creates space between the pelvis and the ribs).
Some of the key muscles involved in Rolfing for back pain will possibly be the muscles involved in hip flexion and the connective tissue which surrounds them as well as the various lower back muscles and the strong ligaments that hold the sacrum in place (the sacrum is the triangular bone at the base of your spine which you might know as the tailbone)
Rolfing’s great strength is that it is non-invasive, and hence while undergoing Rolfing you will be able to continue with daily life and even sports, while simultaneously treating and relaxing your back muscles, which will eventually allow you a greater range of movement and increase your flexibility.
Dr Ronald Tarrel. D.O., a neurologist at the Noran Neurological Clinic in Minneapolis, says, “I refer my patients who may be surgical candidates, or others that have had surgery for neck and back injuries, to Rolfing Universally, I have had an 80-85% success rate with these referrals One key reason I refer is that Rolfing offers relief to patients who think their left-over pain is due to failed surgery. They may be so tightly bound after the surgery from the scarred tissue that their soft tissue needs to be released. Rolfing can help greatly with this.”
http://www.rolfing-london.co.uk/backpain.htm
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