"THE GIFT OF AN AUTO ACCIDENT" - A Patient's Healing Story

I visited a chiropractor in January 2009 for neck pain. I'd had this pain in a mild way for almost 15 years, but it had suddenly gone from a nagging inconvenience that occurred at the end of a long day, to a tormenting presence that never abated.

The chiropractor diagnosed me with a bulging disc and predicted that with adjustments and exercises, and the help of a neck brace I would wear for 8 hours each day, I would be fine in 6 weeks. I held her in very high esteem, as she'd successfully helped me through a minor injury the previous year and her reputation in the community is stellar. So, of course, I was relieved to hear that both this unbearable current pain and this 15 year nuisance would be in my past before Mardi Gras.

Six months later, several projected dates for when I would be finished recovering had come and gone. In that time, I had created a host of artificial boundaries around my life in an effort to prevent further neck pain. I'd cut down my hours at work, I had eliminated my social life in the evenings, I'd abandoned my garden. I lived in perpetual fear that undue stress on the discs would bring the pain on. Even when I wasn't in pain, I couldn't enjoy it.

My chiropractor had approached me around the six month mark and said that she owed me an explanation for why I was still experiencing such pain and why it actually appeared to be getting worse than it had been around the 3-4 month mark. She admitted regretfully that she didn't have an explanation for me. She suggested I have an MRI on the area to determine what any other interfering factors might be. The results of the MRI showed that I had 4 bulging discs, which was more than we thought, but still called for the same course of treatment ...which simply wasn't working.

In June, I drove up to New Jersey with my partner to visit his family for two weeks. On the way up, we had a small fender-bender. I called my chiropractor immediately and we determined that Dr. John Kane was the closest chiropractor.

I went to Dr. Kane's office with the intention of getting an adjustment to prevent the accident from worsening the condition in my neck. After determining that I didn't need an adjustment, he suggested a different approach to treatment. It seemed to me that if we didn't know what was causing my problem, or why I wasn't responding to what ought to have been helping, then it would have been absurd to reject a different approach to treatment. The lack of progress in healing before now had become an emotional as well as physical burden. I left his office that first day with a mixture of excited hope, smothered by a fear of getting my hopes up and being disappointed again.

My partner was interested in the new approach. I did my best to explain that Dr. Kane saw my neck pain as manifestations of problems in my neurological pathways. He had identified several pathways that were distorted and in need of attention and set a course of action to mend these pathways with NMT.

After the early sessions I was still so stifled with anxiety and apprehension that I felt basically the same when I left. But as the sessions went on (I decided to see Dr. Kane 7 times in the 2 weeks I was in NJ), my neck had more and more endurance for normal functioning, and I developed an affinity for the NMT sessions. When each session ended, I had a sense of euphoria and gratitude. Then one day I noticed that my neck brace was under a pile of stuff, and it had been there for a few days. I hadn't been wearing it and I hadn't even noticed.

Another element that Dr. Kane was addressing in our sessions was depression. I was finally diagnosed with clinical depression when I was 13, after suffering from it from around the age of 5, and have been on anti-depressants for 16 years. I started having panic attacks after Hurricane Katrina and I added an anxiety medicine to my regimen.

Dr. Kane felt that the depression was interwoven with the other physical manifestations of the corrupted pathways and that our goal and our process needed to address the depression in order succeed. We talked much less about the depression itself, though trauma and forgiveness were the most distinct themes I was aware of in the pathway work Dr. Kane did. During one session, the most interactive one, Dr. Kane asked me to invoke memories of "stressful" events in my life chronologically while he pushed on my hands and manipulated acupressure points. It appeared to be a challenging session for both of us, especially when we arrived in 2005 at Katrina.

I'm not sure what we did that day. But the same thing happened to my anxiety medicine as happened to my neck brace. I let it get separated from the vitamins I take every morning. Sure, it's around here somewhere, but I haven't needed it. Now that I am back in New Orleans I still continue NMT care with Dr. Kane over the phone.

Heather M.
New Orleans, LA