The purpose of this article is to go into some detail about my experience of chiropractic treatment as an effective cure for chronic back pain.
After my doctor told me to go home and take painkillers for my bad back of several years, I decided to take matters into my own hands and look at ways of fixing the root cause of my pain, not just the symptoms.
The first idea that popped into my head was to go and see a chiropractor. I imagine this is hardly a huge revelation for many of you. Of course you go and see a chiropractor when you have a bad back.
Where I live, there are several chiropractors dotted around the main drag. I did a bit of research on them; we have a good local online forum where people post their experiences of various local businesses and one of the chiropractors got consistently positive reviews. Well that was that decision made, a quick phone call later and I was booked in for the initial consultation.
When I got down there later that week I remember sitting filling out the registration form and looking at this poster in the reception. It was of a huge iceberg. The smallest tip of which was the only thing above the surface. Below the surface however lurked the huge bulk of the 'berg. There were two arrows, one pointing to the tip and one pointing to the hidden monster under the water. The caption next to the arrow pointing to the tip was "your symptoms" and the caption next to the arrow pointing to the rest of the iceberg read "your problem". This immediately made all sorts of worse-case scenarios flooding through my mind. What if my sore back was actually the symptoms of spinal cancer or some such other horror?!? It's like that chapter in Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (by the way if you haven't read this, the funniest book in the entire world then get yourself onto Amazon and get a copy) where J starts reading a medical dictionary and realises with dismay he has every condition in there apart from, it appears, Housemaid's Knee!
Just as I was beginning to fear the worst my unassuming chiropractor ushered me into his office. I told him about my bad back and he made me do the same sorts of stretches my doctor had done before sending me home with a bottle of Tylenol. He even rolled a small sharp metal wheel a bit like one of those things you cut pastry with across my thigh. Eventually after a lot of scribbling on his chart he told me that what I needed was a few X-Rays. Only then he said, can we see what is happening. So off I went to the local X-Ray man which funnily enough was in another chiropractor's office across town. An hour later and I had my X-Rays and was heading back to iceberg-central to hear the bad news.
What my chiropractor told me was quite surprising. He said that there was nothing really the matter with my back. The problem, he said, was my neck. But my neck is fine I replied, are you sure there is no spinal cancer in evidence? No he was quite sure the issue was with my neck and to prove it he popped up my neck X-Ray onto the screen. The problem is that you neck has been pushed forward from years of stooping and looking down. Being as tall as you are (6'6″) your neck has, for years been under the tremendous force of your head pulling forward and down. It was, he went on, one of the worst cases he had seen, being some 8 centimetres away from where it should be. He said that I was lucky to have caught it so young as in another 10 years I would have been in a lot of trouble.
After all this had sunk in and I had looked more at my X-Ray with its china marker drawings of angles and lines added by the chiro, I enquired what was to be done. Traction is your best bet. Traction and manipulation but we can do it all here and you are looking at at least 4 months of regular visits. When do we start? Right now.
The next thing I know I am lying face up on his table and he is slowly manipulating my bowling ball of a head which has been the cause of all this trouble. Deep breath, relax, CRACK. If you have ever had chiropractic manipulation you know what I am talking about when I said I nearly jumped out of my skin. When I had recovered sufficiently to realise I was not paralysed from the neck down I enquired whether this was normal. Indeed it was according to my assailant and I had apparently just had a very good "release". My neck actually did feel nice and loose and the manipulation itself didn't hurt per se, it just felt really really odd.
Anyway next up was the traction. For this part of the proceedings I was to lie on a contraption called a Gombali which is essentially a small stool-like affair that one lies down on, puts one's head in a harness which is in turn attached to a piece of elastic rope like a bungee cord for attaching parcels to motorcycles. Once your head is in the harness, the cord is pulled tight which stretches your head right back and keeps it there under tension. The goal here is to slowly pull the neck back into its proper position. Twenty minutes I had to lie in that thing. When the elastic was released I could not believe the the relief. I could also not believe how hard it was to bring my head forward, so used had it become to being in the pulled back position. After a drink of water I had another chat with my Spanish Inquisitor who told me that I needed to come for manipulation and Gombali traction 3 times a week for 6 weeks whereupon I would probably be ready for proper traction.
Proper traction? As opposed to the pretend traction I had just been enduring for the last twenty minutes? But what about my back I asked? His answer was that my biggest problem by far was the parlous state of my neck (this was my hidden iceberg). If I didn't fix that first then there would be no point in looking into the back pain. He said that the two may very well be related but that it was imperative that the neck angle was corrected. In any event I agreed to come back in two days time.
As I walked home I ruminated over everything that had happened in the previous couple of hours. The main thing that struck me was that I had submitted to the traction without doing any research into it. This worried me and I resolved to do a great deal of research into the subject before subjecting myself to more sessions.
The pulling of my neck backwards was pretty uncomfortable and this was certainly not the first time that 20 minutes felt like 20 hours while getting this treatment. According to my chiropractor I had vertebral subluxation of the bones in my neck. When I got home I did a bit of research on this topic.
The term Subluxation is used by chiropractors to describe an altered position of the vertebrae. This misalignment of the bones puts pressure on spinal nerves which causes a knock on effect of improper function to other parts of the body. The traction process is supposed to gently restore the bones to their proper position, thus relieving the pressure on the spinal nerves and thereby relieving the patient's symptoms.
There is definitely strong differences of opinion in the medical profession and even within some parts of the chiropractic community over whether the "subluxation complex" actually exists. Some argue that it is a made-up construct that was retro-fitted by chiropractors to explain the success of their treatments. Others maintain that it is a scientifically testable condition that left untreated leads to disease states in the body.
All I knew was that I had a bad back and my neck X-Ray did look terrible - no nice backwards curve for me, oh no. So after a lot of reading on wikipedia and other websites I decided to stick with the process and see what the results were. I knew that the particular chiropractor I went to had been in the same location for at least 10 years so I reasoned that if he had a track record of crippling people, he wouldn't still be there!
So back I went a couple of days later for my next stint in the torture chamber. This time I got some manipulation on my lower back. This involved lying on my side with one leg pulled up. The chiro then sort of twisted me by pushing down on the pulled up leg and the opposite shoulder at the same time. This gave the most amazing popping sound and all my pain in the back vanished. He warned me at the time that this would not last all day but over time would help with my overall condition.
Then it was time to get back on the Gombali. This time, because I knew what to expect it wasn't such an ordeal. Twenty minutes later I was back out on the street. And so it went on for about a month, at which time my chiropractor announced I was ready to graduate to some heavier traction. This would, he said start to pull my neck back from the base which would ultimately give the correct angle.
With a slight feeling of apprehension I took my seat in front of a pulley system. A harness attached to my head, and to this harness was attached a bag containing 5Kg of weight. The Gombali was a walk in the park compared to this. The pain as the weight was brought to bear was very intense and I had to support the back of my head to make it bearable. So we dropped the weight and this time it was merely very unpleasant.
After a week I was able to build up the weight again but it really was a very uncomfortable thing to go through. What made things worse was the radio in the clinic was tuned to a station that seemed to play the same easy listening music. Every day the same songs would come on and I would swear they lasted about an hour each! In the beginning I would always be checking the clock every few seconds for the twenty minutes I was subjected to the traction. In the end I used to force myself to wait two songs between each look at the clock. Sometimes two songs would go past and I would be very annoyed to see only five minutes had elapsed when I felt sure it would be more like twenty!
This went on three days a week for about 8 weeks. People did start to say that my posture looked a lot better and I looked at different photographs taken before and during the traction and you could clearly see a big difference in my posture. I actually grew half an inch over the course of the treatment.
After I had gone the prescribed time, the chiropractor asked that I get another set of X-Rays done so we could check my progress, so back I went to the X-Ray place. In the car when I was driving back I kept looking at the X-Rays, holding them up to the car window to see if I could see any improvement. Let's just say it was hard to tell!
However when I got back to the chiro's office and he put the before and after pictures up for me to see side by side, the difference was amazing. In the most recent picture you could clearly see a much healthier looking curve in my neck bones compared to the dreadful-looking slouched image from before the treatment.
So now that I had a properly re-aligned neck, was my bad back cured? The short answer is no. While I did get short-term relief from the adjustments that the chiropractor made to my back, I could not honestly say that my back pain was much better. When I brought this up, he said that there was still further work to do on the neck. At this point I decided to forego any more treatment - the traction was really too intense to face another round of 3 days a week agony. I felt that after three months of this I should try some other things and perhaps re-visit the chiropractic in the future. The chiropractor indicated that without regular maintenance traction, the neck would slowly go back to where it was originally. For a few weeks I did go back for a light stretch once a week but in the end I decided to discontinue the treatment.
So my feelings about chiropractic are definitely a bit mixed. That my posture was improved by the traction, there can be no doubt; however no real benefits to my original problem were realised unfortunately. However perhaps it was a very worthwhile exercise and I have fended off a problem I did not know I had. Time will tell I suppose.
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