mom wrote:When is the confernce?
I have not read her bio yet. I need to down load some paper work so I do need to get on their web page.
So how many years out you from being properly aligned by Mr. Hesch are you? How often have you had to have repeat treatment with him? ( If at all) And what symtoms or pains was he abke to alieviate for you?
( you may have told me all of this at one time, but I can't recall)
The conference was in October last year so probably will be again: so far their website just says the "Fall Conference" dates will be announced soon and that it will be in Las Vegas: yay! No travel for me!
Rundown of my case, the "brief version" is in my signature:
I have (I know now) a gait issue that predisposes me to injury, doesn't sound like what happened with your daughter so I won't bore you with the details. But when I was 14 I went on a backpacking trip over rough terrain with a heavy pack and came home with interstitial cystitis. At the time nobody was associating IC with biomechanics or pelvic injury; I was told it was autoimmune. What had really happened is that I had injured my pelvis. Although I seem to have injured it more later, I can track the initial injury back to that time period because it did give me a leg length discrepancy. I compensated unconsciously for my right leg being 1 1/2 inches longer than my left by weight-bearing much more on the right and standing with my right hip pushed out to the side. I didn't notice the change in posture consciously but for one thing, my parents did, because when I was 38 and found out I had the leg length discrepancy they admitted they had noticed the hip out the whole time and had chalked it up to "teenage attitude" (and adult attitude too I guess
). So anyway I had IC and migraines that whole time but the medical care was so poor I learned some good self-care, started refusing medical care, and lived quite comfortably for almost 20 years as a person with a chronic illness in remission.
Meanwhile, as you will see if you check out the MRN results I posted in the MRN / MRI section, I was doing tremendous damage to my muscles by walking around all torqued: The MRN shows all the right-sided muscles to be overdeveloped and in spasm vs. the left. Both piriformis muscles on exam are very tight, and I have 16 of the 18 "tender points of fibromyalgia", although I do not qualify for a diagnosis of fibromyalgia as I do not have musculoskeletal pain or fatigue. MRI of my brain also shows a small clot from the years of migraine syndrome, secondary to the neck compensation for the torqued pelvis.
I began to get neuropathic itch in my fingers during a long car trip in 2002. I did not have medical insurance at the time so I tried various remedies for nail fungus and took up the habit of keeping my nails very short so I could easily rub the fingertips against a hard surface which was really good enough for itchy fingertips.
2004 I had my second child; her birth was pitocin-induced and what is called "precipitous" meaning intense labor of less than 2 hours, baby shoots accross room and Doctor cayches baby like football, LOL. Anyway I got very heavy during that pregnancy, had knee pain during the pregnancy that I had to do PT for, and took off the weight afterwards by walking 2 miles per day in addition to diet. Now, as I said, my gait was messed up...so I really don't know if I injured my pelvis more from becoming something resembling a sumo wrestler during the pregnancy, from the childbirth, or from the daily walking and/or elliptical machine use after the birth...but I started shortly after the birth with neuropathic itch that came on gradually and insiduously, first in the toes, then upper pubic region, then anal region. It continued to intensify all the time and erode my quality of life, and I continued to go to Dermatology, Allergy, Nutritionists, because it was itch. Finally I went to the Mayo clinic Dermatology and they suggested it might be neuropathic. So I started to address the issue with Neurologists in early 2009, got a routine, non-pudendal EMG that proved the hands and feet were indeed neuropathy, and the brain MRI...but not much help with treatment. Then I made a bad move in the summer of 2009 and drove a 3600 mile road trip. I came home not just absolutely crazy with neuropathic itch and popping neurontin like it was candy, but with severe neurogenic bladder spasms which left me pretty much totally disabled. I could not wear an adult diaper because the itch was too bad, and I could not do much of anything without one because I felt like I was constantly using all my muscles to keep from wetting myself, and had to run to the bathroom every 5 or 10 minutes which basically killed even the basics like grocery shopping or driving my kids to school.
So this is when it became my full time job to get well. 1st I had to self-diagnose pudendal neuralgia online, yay for internet! It wasn't around when I was 14 and it took the Doc 2 years to figure out I had IC. Then I went to the providers site and found Tina, who is the only pelvic floor PT in town. She was the 1st one to actually look at my stance and gait and tell me I had a huge leg length discrepancy and was totally misaligned, muscles a mess, etc. She started doing the standard pelvic floor PT stuff with trigger point work, excercises, and trying to get me into alignment. I actually responded much better to PT than most people on this board did. While my bladder remained uncomfortable it did improve to the point where I could function, do things like drive my kids to school as long as I used the school bathroom before driving home, walk a couple of times around the block, go shopping. My neuropathic itch really was not helped though, and Tina and I were both frustrated because it was obvious that we were not making progress with my pelvic alignment. It was out of whack in a new way every time. I started to wear an S-I belt which finally clued me in to the fact that no amount of excercise was ever going to keep my pelvis in alignment. I had to wear the thing so tight to keep my pelvis from shifting around, I realized I could become a professional bodybuilder without ever producing enough muscle strength to solve the problem.
Tina knew Jerry and so she sent me over to him. I had literally 5 "a la carte" problems with my pelvis (upslip on the left and downslip on the right leading to the leg length discrepancy, for example), plus a pattern of lower pelvic fixation that actually includes 5 seperate dysfunctions...I was a mess! It took 2 visits, a total of about 3 hours, to straighten it all out, and then there was a re-check visit. The lower fixation pattern was fixed on the second visit and that is the part that gave me immediate relief of about 50+% of my neuropathic itch. My bladder felt a little better but continued to improve over the next month or so and is now better than it has been since I was 13. I consider my bladder discomfort, both neurogenic and IC, to be 100% cured except for that some of the meds I have tried still do irritate my bladder. Also although my bladder feels fine, I have to be very careful (drink lots of water, etc) to prevent bladder infection as I have painless incomplete bladder emptying (excess residual), which predisposes me to infection: this is neurologic. My neuropathy symptoms went from a 5-7 down to a 1-5, and now that I have tweaked my med regimen it is 0-3. The reason I am not cured is I am sure the 25 years of damage. I have cysts filled with spinal fluid on my S2 nerve roots (tarlov cysts), which correlate very well with my remaining symptoms, and am also working on getting botox approval for the piriformis muscles to rule these out as a contributor, as I do have a lot of years of muscle damage.
Jerry re-aligned my pelvis in December 2009 and re-aligned it stays, with no more work. The prevailing paradigm is to find what is "hypermobile" and try to keep it in place: this is what I was doing in regular pelvic floor PT and it is a lot of work. Jerry looks instead for what is stuck (hypomobile), and releases it back to normative function, which causes the hypermobilities to correct automatically in most people. I did not REALLY have a hypermobile pelvis. I had a stuck pelvis, with hypermobile compensations. So now it is not stuck, and I have learned how to correct my gait, so I have not re-injured it.
The gains I made from the Hesch Method work, I made very quickly. The gains I have made since have been due to perfecting my med regimen. What I have left to do is to rule out the piriformis as a contributor by getting botoxed, and then assuming this does not cure me I need to look into the tarlov cyst surgery. Now Tarlov cyst surgery is a fairly major neurosurgery, and I function very well and am comfortable most of the time, this has gone from being a life-changing issue to an annoyance. So I will have a major decision to make when it comes to that.
As for Jerry, he does brief treatment. What he can fix, he fixes in 1 to 5 visits. Out of town clients he usually sees for 3 visits over 3 days. If the pelvis is truly hypermobile, which is actually rare, he teaches self-treatments to keep it in alignment at home: he believes in patient independence. There is very little he does, that he cannot teach the client to do or teach somebody else to do to the client.
So Jerry's part of my care is done, and what it has done for me is make me go from a full-time patient (I was going to PT 2 times per week and doing the excercises at home twice daily, and doing self-release of trigger points daily, etc), back to being a person who has a life outside of my disability.
I think that is MORE than what you asked for, so that's it from me...now you know better than to ask me a question
