I began experiencing pain in my neck and shoulder area last November (2008). I ignored it for a while but it continued to grow worse.
In January, at a business networking meeting, I met a woman who is a chiropractor, specializing in upper cervical treatments. There are only about 500 such doctors in the U.S.
Before I began treatments with her, I also suffered with hip pain due to sciatica. After just a few treatments with her, the sciatic pain disappeared, which was an absolute joy for me! It took longer for the neck and shoulder pain to go away because the problems there had taken many years to develop, possibly due to a fall I had had back in middle school, or the car accident I was in while in high school. My head was literally sitting "off-side" from my spine.
Many people don’t like/trust chiropractors, but I prefer treatments without prescription meds, and the medical community would have given me pain killers and surgery for what she accomplished with just a few treatments. So I have less pain and a much lower cost (with no surgical-recovery time) than standard medical treatments.
She performs an adjustment to the atlas, the top vertebra of the spine. I feel extraordinarily blessed to have found her. I found a few websites online that describe these treatments and the results. You can find much more information by just searching “upper cervical” on the web. The most striking information online is a You-Tube video from a Montel Williams program in which he describes the relief from pain he experienced from this type of treatment. That video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiOtb6yM_ow
Other great sites I found:
http://www.upper-cervical.com/
There is a directory of upper cervical practitioners at www.upper-cervical.com as well.
Chiropractors receive as much training in most subject areas as medical doctors, and more training in some subjects. If there is something that requires a medical doctor’s intervention, a chiropractor will advise of this and will not undertake any treatments for you until that issue is resolved. Chiropractors are not legally allowed to give you a diagnosis–they can only tell you that you need to see a doctor if they find such a condition.
Getting an opinion from a chiropractor may be a good place to start for you. Most chiropractors charge a very reasonable amount for the preliminary consultation and some insurance plans will cover costs for chiropractic treatments.
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