The Road to Recovery

When you want to transform your posture and permanently get rid of pain or other symptoms, you must go through a process called ‘unwinding’. This process is similar for everyone, although what you feel from it varies per person. 

Before treatment, you have poor posture and/or symptoms (pain, lost motion, stiffness, etc.) that result from mechanical problems in your body. Mechanical problems arise when bones misalign in directions your body can’t self-correct because there are no muscles to pull them back into place. This can happen from injuries and falls, but also from soft mattresses, bad chairs and wearing the wrong kind of shoes.

Because your body can’t correct these stuck bones by itself, it compensates by twisting, turning and locking up. By the time you notice a problem or start feeling pain there are usually many layers of compensations. Every time I correct the problems your body can’t, it starts correcting the things it can correct until it runs into the next set of problems. It’s like peeling off layers of an onion; with every layer gone you get closer to the original injury site.

This process is explained in the picture below. Your body starts to heal by moving in a backward, more upright position. This is where pressure is relieved from the injured sites and your body function improves (upward line in graph). To continue improving, your body has to partially untwist forward (downward line in graph). In these phases you may feel pain again, but your body is unlocking. This allows me to further correct any problems. As you can see in the graph, this process happens many times. 

It’s very important to understand that your body will go through these changes. It means that at times you will feel great, and at times you might feel like you’re doing worse. Due to the increased pressure on your body when it untwists forward you may feel sore, anxious and depressed, but please note that this doesn’t mean that the treatment isn’t working! Your body is doing exactly what it needs to do to improve further. Unfortunately the saying ‘no pain, no gain’ applies here. This process is a necessary part of healing, and no transformation is ever easy. 

It can take up to 12 weeks to unwind sufficiently through layers of injury before reaching a stable and comfortable phase. Within this time frame you should see a great deal of improvement in your posture, your energy levels, your alertness and you should feel very well. Most likely, all or most of your symptoms should also be greatly reduced and many people will be symptom-free.

There is an end point where your body is completely corrected. You can compare this process with getting braces for your teeth, because for most people this takes a couple of years of intensive treatment to get there. But not everyone wants perfection, and of course that’s OK too. It’s always up to you how long you want to receive care. 

Although it’s a good idea to come in for a check-up every month, as long as you are in a stable, backward phase, you will be able to stop treatment altogether. Please don’t stop in a forward phase! I want you stable and feeling good when you stop coming in. A forward phase can take anywhere from 1 to 4 treatments. When you stop treatment, please stick to the advice about sitting, standing and sleeping. This will keep your body as stable as possible. Of course you can come back any time if you want your posture corrected further, or if your symptoms return or change. 

Get ready to start looking better, feeling better, and moving better soon!