Pain is not always what it seems…
The following is the story of a 54 year old woman who had over 30 years of chronic upper back pain. She had been seeing chiropractors for years with some pain relief, but no lasting correction.
Her daughter, who is also a chiropractor, sent her to me.
In questioning her how it started she said she hit her head. This is why you take a good history!
Essentially, she said there wasn’t much to do as a teenager up on the Iron Range (northern Minnesota). So, the local kids would jump their cars across two roads that cross each other.
The road they were driving on would be dirt, and the road they would jump over was tar. And where that tar was laid down there was a lip that could get that car to somewhat “jump” off the ground. I’m sure you can imagine what that lip looks like.
Not wearing a seatbelt, my patient slammed her head into the ceiling when she was around 16 and had chronic neck/upper back pain ever since.
Her previous attempts at treatment all failed to give lasting results because they were treating the symptom and not the cause.
The cause was that she jammed the bones of her skull. And when they were jammed they put tension on the meninges that cover the brain and spinal cord. The meninges are like a plastic wrap.
The secondary effect was tension in the upper back because the meninges were being pulled. Chiropractic adjustments to the upper back alone could produce temporary relief by releasing some tension, but the pain would come back within hours or days.
The tension never had a chance to release because the treatment was not directed to the correct area.
By adjusting her skull bones (cranium), I was able to help her achieve permanent pain resolution by correcting the primary cause.