Pain Free Living

NEVER EXPLAIN, NEVER COMPLAIN is a pretty good rule, yet I’m going to break half of it. I’m not a complainer, but when I blow it, the least I can do is give you a heads-up about what went wrong and why.

In my first book, The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion, I described the outward physical characteristics of three categories of musculoskeletal system dysfunction, and offered guidance on how readers could easily figure out whether they fit into Conditions I, II, or III. The idea was to provide a process for self-diagnosis that would set the stage for the next step: do-it-yourself postural therapy that addressed the specifics of each condition. As I wrote at the time, when you know what to look for, musculoskeletal misalignment and imbalance are easy to spot.

What surprised me, however, was that many people couldn’t do it. In particular, readers whose posture was most similar to Condition III were entirely confused by the drawings and written description. Only the most intrepid readers could bring themselves to gaze into the mirror and admit they looked that bad. Condition II’s were slightly better at self-diagnosis, but not by much.

Both Condition IIs and Condition IIIs, even if they were in horrible pain, tended to choose Condition I, which led them to follow an E-cise menu that didn’t work as well.

Amazingly, I still get rave reviews for the book. People call the Del Mar clinic out of the blue to tell me how good those E-cises make them feel. When I ask a few questions about what’s currently going on with their body and hear answers that indicate that they are classic, industrial-strength Condition IIIs, I’ve learned to say, “Go to the E-cises for Condition III. Don’t look at the pictures or read the description; just try the E-cise menu.” Often they sound shocked that I would even think of linking them to Condition III. I fear that some of them put down the phone and, convinced they or I misunderstood, go straight back to Condition I. There’s no harm done (on the contrary, a lot of help is delivered regardless of which menu is used), but they are not getting the full benefit of the method.

The sad truth is that today, more than ever, my unvarnished description of Condition III in The Egoscue Method is what most Americans and most affluent and middle-class people around the world look like and hurt like. Tragically, that look of imbalance and musculoskeletal misalignment has become the new normal. When the old normal walks by—a rarer and rarer occurrence—he or she seems strange.

The individual vertebrae of the spine ride on cushions— spongy disks that resemble jelly donuts—that act as shock absorbers. Imbalance and misalignment result in the weight of the upper torso and head squeezing down on the disks unevenly to cause the “jelly” to either bulge from between the vertebrae or rupture (it actually pops like a balloon and the filling oozes out). Either way, the result is a painful nerve impingement.

Yet, even though this new normal has taken hold, there are still three broad categories of readily observable musculoskeletal system conditions. They are accompanied by overt behavioral patterns that are expressed as actions, attitudes, and emotions. I call them “AAE patterns.”

To put it more plainly, it is not just the postures that matter—it’s your head. To help you make a self-diagnosis, I don’t have to show you any examples of dysfunction. Hallelujah! There’s no need to scare you with lurid depictions of desperate people who are about to crash and burn. Instead, I will help you feel what’s going on in your head, in your heart, and in your body’s core systems that monitor and operate this amazing thing that we so casually refer to as human health. Best of all, you won’t have to take my word for it. You know more about your body than any expert, because you feel it and they don’t.

I started this book by asking, “How do you feel?” However, some people—perhaps you—can’t answer that question because one of the three most common AAE patterns is disrupting their ability to get an accurate reading from their emotional feedback loop.

Example: J.B.’s back was hurting when he came to see me a couple of years ago at the San Diego clinic. He told me right off, “I’ve got a herniated disk.”

Okay. That is not a nice thing to have. I asked him to stand pigeon-toed with both cheeks of the buttocks and his lower and upper back against the wall. Try it yourself: level your chin and make sure the back of your head is against the wall, otherwise there is a tendency for the head and neck to come forward and down. Now put your shoulders against the wall.

Instead of starting with a demonstration of how postural balance can switch off the pain symptom, we have a discussion of whether the client wants a cure or treatment. Surprisingly, about one in twenty clients say they want treatment.

I didn’t argue with J.B., but I knew that the pigeon-toed stance temporarily repositioned his hips and in so doing moved the affected vertebrae off the distended disk to free the jammed nerve. Without the impingement, the magnitude of the pain had to decrease. While there might have been an echo of tenderness, the worst of the pain went away almost immediately. J.B.’s reaction didn’t surprise me, though. His feelings were being distorted by his default AAE pattern. He was a big, strong, courageous guy, yet fear and a history of pain had switched off his ability to accurately assess what was going on in his back.

Pain is not a disease, not an injury, not even an effect of aging. Pain is a symptom—in J.B.’s case, a symptom of postural imbalance. Not the only one; there were many others that produced little or no pain at all. The way he sliced a golf ball, for instance (pain free as long as you weren’t in the line of fire), and the contortions he went through to get in and out of his car—J.B. drove a low-slung Italian job, and he struggled to lower himself into the driver’s seat— caused serious pain. Eventually, he sold it and bought something more sedate. But even his new luxury sedan was a challenge to J.B. until he got his functional posture back.

Symptoms are irrelevant—go for a cure. Cures come about only when the bullet of intervention is aimed at, and hits, the actual cause of a condition. Shooting innocent bystanders usually serves only to create collateral damage and costly medical bills.

Favorite symptomatic treatments of herniated disks include removing the disk in conjunction with fusing the adjoining vertebrae, or trimming away the ruptured disk material. No matter what, the spine is still unbalanced and unevenly squeezing the remaining disks. Fusing the vertebrae worsens the imbalance and creates stress on the shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles, and snipping off the protruding disk material probably means you’ll be having a lot of recurring back surgery.

For J.B., the cause of his condition was lack of energy. His back pain and postural imbalances were symptoms of an energy deficit that always occurs when the body is left unplugged. Just as the ice cream stored in your kitchen freezer will melt if the electricity goes out for a couple of hours, when the body goes off-line and loses contact with the universal power grid, it too melts. Musculoskeletal form and function are quickly lost without a constant flow of high-wavelength energy. Why? Death dematerializes living tissue. Only the subatomic structures endure forever. Short of death, the early, obvious, and progressive stages of dematerialization are the body’s means of warning us that something is happening that in many cases—far more than we think—is within our power to substantially affect. By ignoring the message or merely addressing pain symptoms with painkillers, joint replacement, and other forms of surgery (treatment), the most important message of all is lost.

This is one of the most important points in the book. Your musculoskeletal system is the tripwire that sets off the first of many alarms. When our earliest ancestors first showed up on dry land, they didn’t have the technological tools to explore inside the body, surf the bloodstream, test-drive the immune system, and the like. Instead, they relied on a simple awareness of seemingly superficial changes taking place on the body’s surface or close to it: My left foot is turned out instead of pointing straight ahead; my spear-chucking arm seems stiff; or I’m having trouble keeping pace with my favorite hunting companions. Those folks weren’t rocket scientists, yet they were smart enough to recognize that something had changed. Nothing comes of nothing. They learned to either alter the stimulus that was causing the change (finding a dry place to sleep in monsoon season, for instance), or they lived with the consequences, which often meant dying sooner rather than later. Natural selection favored those who took action based on awareness, and their biological heirs are still blessed with the tripwire provided by the musculoskeletal system.

J.B. has come a long way, but he has misplaced his awareness. If I could have waved a magic wand to instantly restore J.B.’s postural balance, his energy levels would have quickly topped off. What prevented that—aside from my wand being in the repair shop to have its abracadabra generator rebuilt—was that he was afraid to accept the idea that something as simple as postural balance was the answer. He resisted treatment in order to keep pursuing facts that he regarded as more plausible and reassuring.

J.B. found more comfort in seeking and collecting new facts, theories, information, and such that he got from living truly pain free. Fact collecting is a common AAE pattern (remember— actions, attitudes, emotions). J.B.’s body was aware of the dangerous shortage of energy and informed him of the situation with a variety of messages, including pain symptoms and such non-pain symptoms as fatigue, irritability, and lack of focus. But his thinking mind had outsmarted his feeling mind by persuading him that he could exert control over these symptoms by using his high IQ and practical experience. Like most fact collectors, however, the search for another set of new facts precludes fact-based actions. What’s the point? The new new facts will blow away the old new facts. J.B. chased facts when all he had to do was stand there and feel the energy being renewed and his health restored as his body was temporarily brought back into balance.

I’ll return to J.B. in a moment; meantime, I want to stop here briefly to deal more directly with the invisible elephant in the room: physical limitation, the werewolf of postural therapy. I’ve already discussed the importance of an individual’s story. The story frames what would otherwise be a meaningless jumble of events, incidents, and sensations. The various pieces of a narrative give meaning and value to the life it represents. A story may be true or false, and in a general sense is neither good nor bad. It just is. Yet a story infused by forebodings of physical limitation and what they portend has the power to interfere with your feeling mind. As a creature of the night, it has sharp fangs and a hairy face.

J.B. saw the world as a dangerously complicated place. Consequently, he had to discover what makes it tick. He searched diligently for facts that would give him the ability to manage the present, predict and prepare for the future, and survive. It was a never-ending quest, because new facts are constantly trumping old facts. As a result, he never needed to make a choice and run the risk of being wrong, which in a complicated, dangerous world could be lethal. Hence, J.B.’s story is crippled by his compulsion to keep collecting facts.

The second of these AAE patterns is skepticism. Like fact collecting, skepticism is also driven by anxiety about physical limitation, which lodges in the emotional catacombs when the musculoskeletal system first experiences a gap in its repertoire of movement. L.J., a child psychologist, freely admitted she was skeptical of anyone and anything who claimed to be able to solve problems or accomplish objectives. She was always on guard against being conned. For her, everyone was a suspect with a hidden agenda. It was L.J.’s job to find it. Acute skepticism protected her from ever making an affirmative decision, and hence she was never responsible for her own problems, including her health.

The third AAE pattern is pessimism, the most extreme form of limitation dread. Tommy worked in pessimism the way some artists work in watercolors. He sought help from dozens of healthcare practitioners and was always willing to try another therapeutic program, but believed that they would fail because he didn’t deserve to succeed.

I am about to introduce three chapters that will offer more information on these behavioral patterns, including recommendations for postural therapy programs that have a demonstrated ability to overcome them. The catch is, I don’t know which one of them is affecting you. It’s going have to be your call, your decision.

I can’t knock experts who are ready, willing, and able to assume responsibility for your health, but I am a complete exception to their rules. I concede that the road from here on belongs to you. Notice that I’ve avoided linking the patterns closely to an individual. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you do, or if you are young, old, male, or female. Read all three of the following chapters and— by the feel of it, not the think of it—decide which of them may be affecting your ability to live pain free. Try the postural therapy program that is the best remedy for your specific fear pattern. Again, by the feel of it, not the think of it, decide if the program works. If not, reread the chapters (or the entire book) and try another program. You may need to try all three before you find the best one for you. Take your time; stay in the moment.