JCK-at-large SITE

My friend Stockton likes to dismiss chiropractors with a harrumph.  “It’s snake oil,” he says.  “They jerk you around and then tell you to come back next week…. rather than give you exercises that will cure the problem.  It’s a money thing!”

I, on the other hand, am a believer.  So I quote the wall hanging in my favourite chiropractor’s office:  “Like the laws of gravity, the laws of chiropractic work whether you believe in them or not.”

I became a believer after our anniversary date, when I threw out my back at our evening dinner, 2022!  It was a fitting feast, as I recall.  I must have handled the implements badly, or sat too far back in my chair.  Anyway, when I pulled up my COVID mask and prepared to make my way to the door, I could not get out of my seat!  My lower back had seized up totally!  And I seemed to have pulled some muscle or other under the shoulder blades — eating dinner!  When I finally staggered toward the door, keeping the lady of the evening on my right arm, people were wondering what I’d had to drink. 

Weeks of dull pain followed.  Oh, I could go about my daily routines, but seldom without a twinge to remind me that all was not well in the spinal region.  There were stretching exercises, knees pulled up to the chin — or at least in that direction! — light jogs around the neighbourhood. Nothing helped.  I was counting the days till I got to my friendly chiropractor on the opposite side of the globe.  

You don’t find a good chiropractor just anywhere.  I found an orthopaedic specialist in Lusaka one time who ran her fingers up my neck and said, “You played rugby in your teens.”  I could not believe such professional perception — at the touch of the finger tips!  

“Yes I did!,” I said, amazed that she would trace a trail across the decades — all the way back to a Buenos Aires Secondary School in the sixties!

“They don’t allow that in England in your teens,” she said.  “Your vertebrae have not yet been established.  Putting young people into those scrums is horrible.  It can do lasting damage.”

I came away informed — but alas still hobbled.

When I finally got to my practitioner, and he laid me out on his magic multi-functional bench — I was fixed in one visit!  Maybe two, for good measure.  “That vertebrae wasn’t out,” he said.  “It was locked.”

So I tell Stockton, when bearing witness, that when your vertebrae is locked, no amount of exercise will help.  You need the touch of a professional hand.  Dr. Graydon starts you off with a little acupuncture.  He may apply a little heating pad.  He runs something up your back that bangs away like a rubber mallet. 

“That feels like roadwork,” I said, thinking of the broken up concrete down on King Street.

“That’s what it is.  Over on your side.”  

Then comes the adjustment, that magic jerk that sets the whole spinal cord in order again.  We wait for the sound of a slight crack and crunch.  Ah!  Everything now back in place!  You are unlocked!  It’s all about a professional touch. 

And thus it is with all our unlockings, I would venture.  We get seized up and hobbled by mysterious forces out of the clear blue. Old hurts unhealed, recent setbacks most unfair, a wrong turn here or there — we like to think that a little exercise will ease the pain of such. We like to think the numbness will go away with time.  We like to think we can fix stuff ourselves.  But sometimes you just need professional help.

Or best of all, for those double-locked internal doors we think can never open, those tightly knotted, gnarly things declaring we will never walk straight again — for such we need the touch of the Master’s hand.