This is a true story. It will either really tick you off or make you feel a great deal of hope, maybe both.
For ten months Andrea O’Donnell was in constant pain. At home she could barely keep up with basic house work. Grocery shopping was unbearable. The laundry was piling up and she couldn’t get herself moving in the morning to get her 3 kids off to school. At work she couldn’t concentrate on what she was doing because the pain was so distracting. Pain shooting from her right hip to her groin, to her right thigh, and down to her calf totally consumed her. In bed at night there was no position that she could tolerate for very long. Any movement started it throbbing all over again. "There was no peace in my life", says O’Donnell, 41, an IT tech in Wappingers Falls, NY. "My pain owned me - It dominated my life". "I used to work out at Gold’s Gym 5 days per week and take the kids out camping, skiing, boating, playing ball on weekends. We did everything - We had a great life until this happened".
A snow-mobile accident in March, 2008 had caused her to be thrown off of the machine and into a tree, injuring her pelvic / sacro-iliac joints. The result was deep penetrating, dull, nagging pain in the hip, groin and leg with weakness, numbness and tingling in her right foot. Some days she said she couldn’t feel her right foot and would trip over it when walking. Some days it wasn’t as bad as others but it was always there if she turned or just moved the wrong way.
Just like millions of others who have chronic back pain, over the following ten months she had been to a whole list of specialists ranging from orthopedists to neurologists, pain clinics, acupuncturists, to physical therapists but nothing seemed to help her. How could this be possible in this day and age? She got ultrasound, traction, icepacks, hotpacks, muscle stim, Tens units. She was taking so many different drugs and medications, that she was like a zombie and didn’t know if she was coming or going half the time. When she got home at night she was almost unable to take care of her kids needs.
And, like so many others in the same situation, she thought was going to have to live with this for ever. Her doctors seem to have tried everything to no avail, but her doctors did not understand the nature of sacro-iliac joint problems. Instead of going after the underlying cause of the problem they treated the pain. Pain is not the problem - It’s merely a signal that there is a problem...somewhere. It’s the check-engine light in your dash-board. When that light goes on it does not mean "turn off the light"- It means look for the problem causing the light to go on...and fix that. Taking a drug to stop the pain is ignoring the problem. It’s like putting a piece of duck tape over the check-engine light so you can’t see it. Maybe that’s why they’re called idiot lights...
When she came to our office (ten months after her accident) I examined her and had some x-rays made of her lower back- something I was very surprised that none of her other doctors had done. The x-rays showed that her sacro-iliac joints were out of alignment. Her sacrum (wedge-shaped bone in the middle of the pelvis), was twisted out of alignment. This caused the entire structure of the pelvis to be jammed or stuck so that none of the individual bones could move properly. This was something that no amount of drugs, ultrasound, hot packs, acupuncture or traction, etc. would ever fix in a lifetime.
Cover up or hide like the tape over the check-engine light, yes, maybe for a while... but never fix it.
You may as well stare at a door and expect it to open for you.
Sometimes I see people who come in with so much pain that they are actually in tears. Many are at the "end of their rope". Andrea sure was. So, it’s really something when someone gets off the adjusting table, hugs me and bursts into tears of joy and relief as Andrea did after the first adjustment I gave her. Imagine that - one adjustment after 10 months of agony and she was feeling better! It kinda gives me a chill in my own spine to think of that. It actually took several weeks for her problem to fully quiet down and let her start to live a normal life again, but since her very first adjustment she was improving daily. She started back to the gym after two weeks of care and was actually able to start thinking of a future again.
How many other Andreas are out there taking drugs, (putting duck tape over their check-engine idiot light), instead of finding out what is actually wrong that is causing all of their pain?
And they call chiropractors "quacks"...?
Drugging people so they don’t feel what is going on is the biggest lie in medical care you could tell.
Email this to someone you know who carries her own stash of Advil in her pocketbook.