Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Back to school... always.


I love being a chiropractor!
Except for when I don't.  

I'll admit, sometimes I've gotten bored.  Not by you though... !  Just bored of the same old same old, you know?  Low back pain?  Snore.  Another popped rib?  Zzzzzz.  Seriously, when the highlight of your day is a sprained ankle, something's got to change.  

Enter my mother-in-law.  Now normally I take her advice like any nice daughter-in-law: I listen respectfully, murmur in agreement and then silently disregard it.  This time, though, something stuck.  She had heard from a friend about a great new technique that may interest me, and she was right.  Neurokinetic therapy presents itself as 'the missing link', and it is. I've since taken 2 out of the 3 modules, and they have reinvorgated my practice and my focus.  NKT is smart and slightly nerdy, adaptable and adapting as more knowledge is shared amongst its followers.  

As I understand and practice it, NKT is a system of 'playing' with the body.  It allows me to find a weak muscle, and then find the compensator.  It guides me to search for relationships in the body, and to correct them.  It tells me what is really going on, what needs to be downregulated (released) and upregulated (activated).  It gives me the info, and then I can use my tools (adjustments, muscle release, acupuncture etc) to do the work.  It is simple and really cool at times.  Yesterday I had a patient who could not maintain any balance in her lateral subsystem from left to right.  The slightest amount of pressure on her right shoulder would knock her over.  When she clenched her jaw though, she was stable as a rock.  When we dissected this a little further, it turned out that moving her jaw to the left made her the most stable.  A small muscle in her jaw, called the lateral pterygoid, was overworking for a stabilizing muscle in her back, throwing off not only her hip, but her entire balance.  

A-mazing.  

And it's changed the way I can look at the old boring things too.  Back pain?  Maybe its connected to that old ankle sprain!  Popped rib? Wonder if there is a diaphragm link?  It's opened up new possibilities and new excitement, and I can't wait to take level 3, where we work on eye muscles and ligaments!  
What are you learning these days?