Posture and Disease
Sometimes I introduce myself as Dr. DeLay to students. I have to put forth the disclaimer that I’m not the kind of doctor that fixes your broken leg or even your broken heart. Today, I’d like to explore some medical issues but as with my students, I have to restate this claim: please seek professional guidance to temper your own research concerning your healthcare.
I’d like to dig into the notion of posture. Particularly as it concerns treatment of certain pathologies. I’m going to give two examples of what I’ll call medical ghost diagnoses; that is, diagnoses from the medical community that were simple blankets aimed at covering a host of symptoms with no known central cause or cure identified. I’m going to explain how these ailments were remedied posturally; that is through behavioral and physical exercise and adjustment of the body’s posture. One case is from my own life concerning oral posture and one from a close friend, concerning hip and abdominal posture.
The point is not to suggest that all diseases can be corrected by conscious attention but instead that we have far, far more control than we often believe.
I am not a proponent of mere belief being sufficient for a medical cure. But today I am absolutely convinced that it’s necessary as a starting point. Let’s look at my friend Alex. Alex and I have known each other for about 15 years. We met through the music scene in LA where we were both aspiring songwriters and later ended up living together in the San Francisco Bay area in pursuit of that art. Our bands shared shows together and generally we were very close friends. My day job at the time was at the UCSF cancer center. I worked managing the research lab of a prominent neurosurgeon, and so I got the reputation of being the go-to guy in our group of friends for all things medical. So, it wasn’t much of a surprise when Alex approached me initially for some casual consultation about a persistent belly ache he’d been experiencing.
Alex worked as a mover. He and a crew of other aspiring musicians would rent an enormous moving truck in the wee hours of the mornings and load up single family homes and trek them around the city. It seemed like seriously hard work compared to my cushy desk and lab duties. But the job had grown difficult for Alex lately. He’d been having trouble sleeping through the nights because of a sharp pain he’d been experiencing after eating. When he visited his doctor, he was told that it was acid reflux, not to worry, and prescribed an anti-acid. Alex actually only came to me after having seen several doctors and having had been prescribed several versions of the same therapy. He began to suspect the doctors were working with a limited set of tools and that those tools weren’t the ones for this job.
At the time, I was only able to reassure him that
yes, while professionals are offer highly trained intelligent folks, they can only be expected to function as they have been taught.
For instance, we worked on a particularly devastating form of cancer called Glioblastoma Multiforme or simply GBM. During my short time working on the disease, the frontline of therapy for GBM had hardly advanced an inch in the past 20 years of research. With advanced surgery and chemotherapy, a patient could expect to gain only a month or two of prolonged life expectancy. Often these therapies would complicate the disease further and I found myself wondering why we would subject patients to such trauma with so little gain. I came to realize that the professionals were desperate to help and that this was their only recourse. Their will to serve the patient outweighed their rational mind’s recognition of the quality of the service they were providing. I advised Alex to dig into the literature and seek solutions outside of the system.
Alex’s quest for therapy took him all across the country. One doctor convinced him that he had an extra rib, which was eventually removed through surgery. Another convinced him that he had a hernia and so surgery was performed to that end. He’d tried every diet under the sun. While all of these interventions had proved fruitless, he had begun to discover that he could manually influence the pain by pressing in certain ways on his own abdomen. This led him down the path to his eventually cure.
Alex started visiting body-workers, and in particular he’d had a fair amount of relief from Rolphers and myofascial manipulators. As he traveled about the country visiting the top professionals in these fields, Alex picked up on the best parts of each technique. During this time, he’d made use of his electrical engineering background and found work as a system engineer for various industrial firms. Eventually, he secured some disability and was able to full-time devote himself toward untangling some deeply and long-time knotted connective tissue surrounding his abdomen. Alex discovered that these connective tissues reached like conveyor belts down through his hips all the way to his feet and oppositely through his shoulder up to his head.
Through manual, body-wide, manipulation he not only managed to alleviate all of his symptoms, but when I first saw him after this transition, he appeared to have gained a foot in stature!
Though Alex’s decade-long journey was harrowing, he’d come to understand that trauma he’d experienced as a mover back in his 20s was at the root of his digestive issues. As a product of those injuries he’d conditioned a stooped and mis-aligned frame. Because one’s guts are very carefully draped across the internal musculature, and pinned in place with connective fascia, postural balance can pay a critical role.
Our bodies are very carefully tensioned structures. It takes extraordinary pressures to keep these 170 pounds upright and comfortable. If those forces aren’t balanced perfectly, organs can sit in the wrong place, guts can fail to pass food, and we can grow highly inflamed or damaged from these insults. Alex’s experience inspired me to work on my own body and most importantly, I developed a sense of responsibility for my physical comfort. I experienced this firsthand just yesterday after a disheartening visit to a local dental clinic.
See, I’d been experiencing some pain on my lower incisors. The incisors appeared to be scraping on my upper teeth and had been apparently doing so for quite some time. I was hoping the dentists would be able to seal or crown those teeth and maybe I’d go on my way. For some reason,
I’d never thought of teeth as organs subject to postural rearrangements.
I was shocked when the dentists told me that they could do nothing for my worn-down front teeth. Any repair would be quickly dismantled by the pressures from my upper jaw. They suggested that I seek orthodontic therapy and essentially have my teeth realigned.
The orthodontic prognosis came with a trace of irony since I’d previously spent the better part of my childhood having the exact opposite alignment issue correct. That is, I had experienced a severe overbite and the doctors had worked for years to move my jaw forward. Now, it was something on an underbite that was causing my pain. If I didn’t take care of the problem, I was told that my upper jaw would eventually drive all of those lower incisors into a haphazard jumble of pulp. I thanked the dentists for their time and went home to think about it.
I was sitting in my backyard reading a book about a neuroscientist, turned stroke survivor when it hit me like a freight train. In this book, Jill Bolte Taylor tells of having to re-learn the most basic behavior almost like an infant. She has to practice rolling side-to-side before she can manage sitting up, and so on and so-forth. I had my own flash of insight that it might be possible for me to consciously realign my jaw by simple training myself to do so. With utter concentration I saw in the early spring sun and tuned in to the pressures upon my teeth as I moved my lower jaw about, trying to find a balance. After a few minutes I found a position that allowed me to pressure my rear molars without my front teeth even touching, let alone gnashing. It felt strange and awkward at first but I let myself relax into the position and was shocked to find it quite comfortable. I sat completely still for maybe five minutes. I couldn’t believe what I was experiencing.
What had happened was that I’d found a postural solution to my pain.
As the hours and days wore on, I realized that I could simply train this new posture by constant attention. Orthodontic principles make it plane that our teeth will bend to the pressures we apply to them. It is my belief that my bite will continue to solidify in this manner, and I’ll be excited to re-explore the issue here in a few years.
Like Alex’s gut issues, which resulted from injuries to his fascia and muscles in his hips but presented as abdominal gut inflammation, my dental posture issues were rooted in trauma I’d experienced somewhat distant from those lower incisors. In other words,
the source of my ailment laid nowhere near the apparent injury,
in my rear molars rather than the sore front incisors. It all went back to a series of very unpleasant dental procedures I’d been subject to when I was on garbage grad student insurance back in New York. Those procedures had caused me to unconsciously avoid chewing with the right side of my mouth. Even after the pain from the actual trauma had resolved, I’d learned to prefer the left side of my jaw and eventually developed a slightly crooked bite that became my standard oral posture. Eventually this offset bite caused my lower teeth to wear down painfully over time.
Certainly, Alex and I have unending roads ahead of us in terms of maintaining and building strength for our newfound postural corrections. Still, the discovery that relief from our pain and was not only within reach, but actually in our own hands, was beyond profound. I hope that you will be able to find similar discoveries with your own discomfort. In particular, when the standard medical treatment isn’t cutting it for you or when you’re diagnosed with a ghost disease like IBS or any other generalized symptom category, consider that you too might have the ability to rearrange your physical posture to extraordinarily productive medical ends. And while belief in that possibility may not prove sufficient to ensure your cure, it is without a doubt necessary.
There are a lot of great resources for postural therapy out there. Right now I’m hooked on the free youtube vids by the guys over at MoveU. Let me know if you find other gems!
