Intelligence in Action
NOT Every Spine's Cup of Tea
by Graeme Lynn, CSTAT, GCFP
Anyone who has ever tried chiropractic treatment for a problem neck or back knows that it can sometimes provide at least temporary relief. Everyone also knows that chiropractors typically recommend endless adjustments. At best, chiropractic strives to re-align the spine, which as we all know carries some risks. But even then, that alignment does not actually address and heal the causes of the spine's misalignment. That is, it does not make any changes in muscle tension, habitual patterns of movement, or your response to stress. And that is why chiropractic itself cannot effectively make you better and why you have to return indefinitely.
Conventional medicine tolerates chiropractors because it can offer only drugs or surgery, the former only palliative, the latter rarely successful, used only when the problem has caused clinically significant damage. Oriental approaches work to balance meridians, or as painkillers or relaxants, and also fail to address the actual causes of back problems.
Physiotherapists often train patients to strengthen the abdominal muscles, to 'stabilize the back'. This sets up a co-contraction whereby the frontal musculature gets stronger, causing the back to work even harder to maintain upright posture, initiating a vicious circle, which in time compresses the body and exacerbates the original back problem. Some physiotherapists even advise exercises to strengthen the back, usually the very essence of the problem! Massage and stretching, while helpful, provide only passive, piecemeal release, so that when one returns to activity, one has no means to practice the relaxation in action, because the use of oneself remains unchanged. And so, the 'bad back' returns.
Whereas it is true that some 80% of adults suffer chronic or recurring back pain, 20% do not! This is because their use of themselves is better, something such fortunate ones do naturally. Still, the other 80% of us can learn such good use because there is a natural design for human movement developed over the millions of years of our evolution in the context of gravity and because we all have a virtually limitless capacity for learning in the form of the human nervous system, which controls sensing, coordination and movement of the body in general and of the back in particular.
Two sophisticated strategies of somatic education, the Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais Method, take advantage of these facts and effectively facilitate this re-learning of 'good use' and functioning and thereby successfully resolve back pain.
Our backs are not the problem. Rather, we use them badly. And as we learn or re-learn to use ourselves and our backs better, we cease to cause ourselves pain: we cease to compress, twist, overwork, misalign, or collapse - and thereby damage - our backs. Many who learn these methods also begin again to find pleasure and interest in movement and find themselves able to return to physical activities that they had long ago given up.
Through sensory-motor learning, the Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais Method make positive transformations in the use of ourselves so that we move better and feel better and better over time. Soon, depending on the original limitation, not only are we free of pain but also we have the means to heal ourselves if we are beset by a new sensory-motor problem in the course of our lives. We become self-understanding, self-reliant, and self-regenerative, knowing our own bodies and capable of our own cure.
To schedule lessons, please contact Graeme in Toronto, Ontario, at 416-964-7026, or click to email.