Why Your Posture Causes Your Pain

“Stand up straight!” your mother nagged you. Did you do it – for more than two minutes? Is good posture really something we can consciously control and improve by ourselves?

The answer is painfully obvious. If we all could consciously improve our posture just by “standing up straight” – or even by going to the gym or getting physical therapy – then we’d all have perfect posture. And we don’t. In fact, it just gets worse and worse as we get older. We get more and more stooped and bent forward. Some women begin to develop that “hump” in their upper back, just like their mother had. Our bodies get warped, twisted, distorted. Look at your own body in the mirror. You’ll probably see one shoulder higher, one shoulder more forward, one foot turned out – and this is only the tip of the iceberg. It’s just what you can see easily. There is much more distortion that is not immediately obvious – distortion of your spine, your hips, your leg bones, your foot bones. In fact, your whole body is affected.

This warping and distortion of your entire body means that your spine is twisted, and as a result your muscles must pull and tighten. Do you have tight, hard, painful muscle knots in your upper or lower back? Have they been there for a very long time, causing you constant pain or discomfort? Now you know why.

Breathe deeply. Does your breath feel small, restricted, tight, difficult? That’s because your body is pushed so far forward that your squashed-in chest is compressing your lungs. If your lungs are being compressed so that you can’t breathe properly, what do you think is happening to your heart? Imagine how that compression of your lungs and heart affects your circulation, oxygen supply, energy level, mental clarity – even your lifespan? Yes, studies show increased mortality with a kyphosis, or forward bend, in the spine.

How We Get Distorted

How do we get this way? And why can’t we fix it by ourselves? The answer lies in the mechanics and physical structure of the body. The body is self-correcting – up to a point. Cut your hand or break your arm and your body can heal and correct the injury, if conditions are right. But there are some kinds of severe injuries that your body can’t fix by itself — without help from medicine or surgery.

It’s a similar situation with correcting the bones in your spine. Sometimes your body can fix them. There are muscles on each side of the spine, so if a bone gets rotated or tilted to the right, there are muscles on the left that can correct it by pulling it back to center.

But – if a vertebra (bone in your spine) gets pushed forward, towards the front of your body, there are no muscles behind it that can pull it back to its proper place again. Even if there were muscles directly behind the spinal bones, those muscles would have to be attached to the wall in back of you to be able to pull the vertebra back and correct it.

So, every time a bone gets pushed forward, it just stays there. How does a bone get pushed forward? You fall off your skates, or your skateboard, or out of the apple tree, or you wrestle with your big brother, or you play baseball, or soccer, or you do gymnastics, or cheerleading, or you go skiing or mountain bike riding, or you have a car accident (that’s a big one!) – or you even just sit in that terrible desk chair all day long with your head pulled forward. After spinal bones get pushed forward many hundreds of times throughout your life, you end up with your whole body bent forward. Your body tries to keep you upright by compensating as best as it can. So it twists your spine, tilts your hips, swivels your shoulders, rotates your legs, tips your feet – causing all the distortion and pain you know so well.

Fixing Your Body

What’s the way out? How can we stand up straight and get out of a lot of pain? The answer is actually very simple – just find the bones that are forward, and move them back. This will immediately correct posture and reduce pain. But there is only one system of body work in the world that has figured out how to do this consistently, reliably, and predictably. That system is Advanced Biostructural Correction, or ABC.

ABC consists of a way to find the spinal bones that are stuck forward and a way to free them up and move them back. It’s comfortable and easy. After your first ABC treatment, you will stand straighter and taller, breathe more deeply and easily, move more fully and effortlessly, and have noticeably less pain. Results can be measured and photographed. Look at the many pictures and videos on the ABC website, at www.ABCMiracles.com.

ABC is mostly done standing, with your back to a wall. Using the ABC system, I find a vertebra that is forward, then I stand in front of you and put my hand behind your back – on the vertebra below the one I want to move. You cross your arms, bend forward, and I you give a gentle squeeze or push. Because I’m blocking the lower vertebra with my hand, the upper vertebra, which is the one that is forward, will slide back into its proper place. Sometimes you’ll feel a pop or click, sometimes not, depending on the position of the vertebra and how far it is able to move at that time.

After the treatment, you will have less pain because we have straightened, aligned, and balanced your body. It’s similar to what happens when the frame of your car is bent and your mechanic fixes it. When the frame was bent, your door didn’t close right, the trunk didn’t close right, and the whole car squeaked and rattled. To fix it, it doesn’t make sense for your mechanic to oil the hinges or try to force the trunk to close – he just straightens the frame and now automatically the door closes, the trunk closes, all the squeaks and rattles disappear and the car drives straight and true.

Each ABC treatment removes a layer of trauma from your body, and we work through the layers like peeling back the layers of an onion. Your body becomes gradually stronger, more stable, more balanced – until the day comes when you need only occasional “tune-up” treatments.

Not Your Mother's Chiropractic

You can tell from this description that ABC is very different from a conventional “plain vanilla“ chiropractic treatment. I used to do this kind of treatment. It has some good effects. It gives you a little better range of motion and a bit less pain, for a while. But I found out that there is one — very big — problem. This kind of “regular“ chiropractic doesn’t correct your spine from the shocks and traumas of life.

You can look in the mirror and see that this is true, because your posture doesn’t improve. After the adjustment you are still slumped forward just as much as you were before. This is vitally important, because posture is not just about looking nice. Posture is actually the outer expression of the inner structure of your body. Someone with poor posture is not someone who is lazy, or sloppy, or who needs to go to modeling school. Someone with poor posture is a person whose spine has been distorted by trauma – whether major, minor, or micro trauma.

Conditions That ABC Can Fix

In every ABC treatment, I check every vertebra in your spine, as well as your hips, legs and feet. In other words, it is a total body treatment every time. This treatment takes three to five times as long as a regular chiropractic adjustment. This means that I can see far fewer patients per day than the average chiropractor, but I am more interested in the quality of my treatments than the quantity.

I treat the whole body every time I see you, because a neck problem is not really a neck problem, it is actually a whole body problem. The neck is part of the spine, which is connected to all the rest of the body. The torquing or twisting in the neck that is causing you pain does not originate from the neck, but from a larger torquing or twisting of the whole body – and that whole body torquing is often caused by bones out of place in another part of the spine. The interrelating causes and effects are so complex that I must adjust the whole body every treatment.

The result is that ABC can help very many conditions, except for cancer, infections, and the like. I’ve seen excellent results with herniated discs, sciatica, chronic back or neck pain, headaches and migraines, carpal tunnel, foot pain, knee pain. ABC is truly wonderful for accident victims, because it will actually correct the trauma of the accident – and in fact leave the person in better condition than they were before the accident.

Three Other Treatments That Work in Synergy

Advanced Biostructural Correction is extremely effective for many very difficult chronic pain conditions. But I wanted to be able to help almost anyone who came to me. So I researched and found three other remarkable treatments. Each of these is the most effective treatment of its type that I could find, and each works synergistically with the others to treat you in a much deeper way than if the treatments were only done by themselves.

For muscle spasms, muscle knots, and scar tissue I use the Rapid Release instrument. This produces a high-speed vibration which penetrates deeply into the muscles, dissolving tight knots and relaxing the tone of the deep tissue. My Cutting-Edge MLS Laser is one of the most powerful therapeutic lasers in the area. It is not a surgical laser that could burn you or cut you, but a therapeutic laser that is very safe to use and has no side effects. It brings down pain and inflammation immediately, and give energy to injured cells to allow them to repair themselves. I use it, in combination with ABC, for herniated discs, torn ligaments, arthritis, and torn rotator cuffs. Finally, The Turner Cranial Technique is a remarkable treatment for repairing the brain and restoring brain function by correcting misaligned cranial bones. This treatment was developed by Dr. Roger Turner of Toronto Canada, and can reverse post concussion syndrome, bringing a person back to normal function after a severe concussion or car accident. It is also very effective for migraine headaches, insomnia, dizziness, and even special needs kids. In fact, in the 27 years that Dr. Roger Turner has been practicing this technique, he has seen over 100 nonverbal autistic children start to speak. I myself have seen four in my clinic, out of six nonverbal autistic kids who came to see me.

When I was a “plain vanilla“ chiropractor, I would often be nervous and uncomfortable when someone came to me with a challenging problem, because I knew that I did not have the tools and ability to help them. I no longer have that feeling. With these four remarkable and powerful treatments, I know that I can help anyone who comes to me, and with almost everyone, I know that I can help them more than any other practitioner that they have seen. I warmly invite you to come to see me. I am really looking forward to helping you correct your posture, get rid of your pain, and get your life back.