I Am Deformed

I've been having some annoying shoulder and neck pain lately which I've been attributing to rugby and like all good Welsh rugby idiots, I've figured if I ignored it it would go away eventually. Ah well.

After a month of wincing I finally decided to see someone about it, but really didn't want to go the whole doctor/surgeon route. So I went to a chiropractor.

I will document my experience over the next few months, which I'll start here by talking about the first visit.

My first note on arrival was that it was pretty much like a doctor's office, girls behind the desk, a bunch of chairs, some magazines. Everything was more naturopathic though, the magazines were all granola types.

After my insurance card was inspected, I was taken to a back room with a massage table device and a computer. A tech came and ran two scanning devices up my spine, one for "nerve imbalance" and the other for "muscle problems".

As she scanned, a graph was being spat out onto the computer monitor, with varying amounts of red and green spiking away horizontally from my spine. She told me this was a significant amount of "nerve imbalance" which I asked what that meant.

She said it meant my nerves were imbalanced, which I politely told her I had understood as much... what did that *actually mean*?

She looked at me quizzically and replied no-one had ever asked her that before.

Anyhoo, the chiropractor came along and told me what was actually going on physiologically, and after a few pokes and prods declared I likely had a straight cervical spine as opposed to one that curves away from your head. He X-rayed me and said no, was wrong. In fact my spine curves in exactly the opposite way it's supposed to, it curves forward.

I took this as proof positive that I am in fact a lot more cro-magnon than most would believe.

So I am currently in therapy, I have had two cracky popping things done to me that have made me feel better, and I have a silly-looking device I have to lie down, strap my head into, and inflate. It sounds funner than it is, believe me.

I will collect up the bills and post them here when I have a few for review. For now, the chap has been extremely forthcoming with information and does not hesitate to answer any of my myriad questions.‎