I went home Sunday-today. For those of you who don’t know (a big list, I try not to complain too much), I suffer from occasional severe headaches. I’ll not have them for up to periods of months, and then get a headache every day for sometimes weeks at a time. I’ll wake up and be fine but around dinner time feel it coming on. The pain really is very bad, but when you get one every day you learn to live through it and not complain or you’ll end up missing everything that goes on. I’ve also made it a point not to get too desenstitized to pain medication.
This description makes it sound much worse than it really is. I do get the headaches from time to time, but not every day like some kind of chronic problem. My dad has always thought it was a really big deal, but when my physician, eye doctor, and dentist all had no clue why I got them, I just resigned that I’d have to learn to live with them and that was that.
Last week Dad called me to tell me that he had a gift certificate to his chiropractor (he’d suffered an injury doing Tae Kwon Do that left him with tingling nerves) and thought I should go in and see if chiropractive “medicine” could find a cause for my headaches. I went in yesterday to have x-rays taken and it does seem like the vertebrae in my neck are messed up which causes pressure on the nerves which makes the muscles spasm causing (all together now): headaches. So the good news is that after a few visits to an office up here I may be cures of most of my problem. The bad news is that now I have to clean my room to find my insurance policy and will finally have to read it.
But all of this got me thinking. The basis of the Chiropractive Arts is that one’s vertebrae can get out of place and this can cause all sorts of problems, and on top of that if the muscles aren’t strong enought to pull the disc back where it goes they just get used to it being out of place so they resist the chiropractor when he pulls them back to where they go. This means you have to keep going in for awhile until your muscles figure out where your spine’s supposed to be.
So (if anyone’s still reading), is my question: What happens when they get REALLY fat patients? It’s got to be harder to manipulate someone’s spinal column when there’s a few inches of back fat in the way.
Do you think that in chiropractor school they have a class on fatties?