OH, the aching back

My neighbor Ron saved me. We were talking “over the fence” the other day and I mentioned that I’d been taken down by bad muscle spams in my back. It turns out that along the way of his medical training, he also picked up a chiropractor license. He said he’d stop by later.

I was thinking he’d “crack my back” with an adjustment. Nope. He asked some questions, tested out my range of movement, and then brought out a strange looking instrument.

It looked like a cross between a door jam and a syringe. He said that dentists used to use them to crack teeth (maybe they still do?). The door-jam part could “aim” the slight jarring jolt it gave to a fairly precise location. You could adjust the strength of the jolt by twisting the thing…. wow, this is a really bad description. I need some vocabulary – hold on…

Ok, it’s variably called a Chiropractors’ reflex gun, tapper, muscle activator, adjuster, impact tool, or chiropractors’ adjustment tool (CAT). Evidently, it can release a force of up to 32 pounds to a very localized area. It belongs to the genre of “thrust adjustment” devices (I will resist the impulse to make a bad joke, I will resist…). He tapped a few spots on my back, tested my range again, tapped a few more spots.

And guess what? The pain subsided quite a bit, and I immediately had more range of movement.

I’m unclear about how this thing works, something about muscles firing and impulses and “resetting” muscle groups. I haven’t been able to find much on the theory, except for some verbiage about muscles that have gotten out of balance. Clearly I’ll have to do a little more research on this. It looks like you can get one of these for something like $150-200. I’ll be looking on EBay, etc. It really made a difference. Or maybe I’ll just use a hammer (grin).

I undid a lot of the good because I had to ready the house for Ben’s birthday party – including the cleaning, lugging supplies, doing decorations (including the helium balloons), moving a table outside, etc. I’m pretty creaky today after doing all that yesterday from 7-2.

If Ron hadn’t rescued me, I honestly don’t know how I could possibly have pulled it off. My back was slowly improving, but I was still waking up unable to turn my head to the left, unable to sit for any length of time without stiffening up, unable to move around much without spikes of pain, the whole thing.

I would have felt awful if Ben’s birthday party didn’t come off as planned because of Mommy’s back pain.

Now if only I could get a good massage…

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