I saw a new chiropractor today (new to me, not new to chiropractic work) who decided he needed to take an x-ray of my neck. I’ve had no scans of my neck since I had my ES surgeries in 2014/15 so I’m dying to know what my styloids look like. I have to wait for a follow-up appt on Wed to find out.
The IRONY - the first thing the chiro said upon looking at my x-ray was - “You’ve lost the lordotic curve in your neck”. I looked at the image, & commented that my neck still looked a bit curved to me. The chiro then showed me what he was talking about. Here I’ve been living in “La La Land” while reading the many posts on our forum about militrary neck/loss of lordotic curve, while smugly thinking mine was fine, & it’s not! This may explain some shoulder & low back issues I’m having.
I suppose now I will be given therapy & exercises to help resolve this problem. Will keep you all updated.
I’m interested to know - is the loss of curve something that can be corrected?
How interesting that your Chiro would suggest imaging. I wonder also what observation led them to do so. It’s great that they’re so in tune to you! The Chiros I’ve seen all felt like thieves or used car salesmen.
So the plot thickens…I also apparently now have scoliosis. Was never diagnosed with it before. It’s not severe, but it’s there. That explains why my head tends to be slightly cocked to the right. I thought that was from my left-sided Meniére’s & the imbalance it causes in my brain. Just more info that shows how complex our bodies are & how little things can make a big difference in our levels of comfort/discomfort (styloids are little things in my book!).
Wow!
So, I’m a systems engineer (computer gal, but for really big computers) and one of the things I’m planning to ask about is - with complex systems, I’ll fix one aspect but there will almost always then be a shift, because you’ve opened up a bottleneck.
So, fixing this huge bottleneck, what sort of problems are then possibly going to occurr? As the load shifts… @KoolDude , maybe you can articulate this better.
No surgery means I’m pretty inarticulate due to brain fog.
Actually, I took two years of orthopedic Pilates trainer instruction so am pretty well versed in our physical anatomy & how the body compensates for weakness in a given area & how that can cause a cascading effect further (usually down, but sometimes up) the line. Our fascial tissues, nerves & muscles are far more interconnected than we can appreciate or imagine!
It was the analogy I was struggling with - the only way I’ve been able to get through all of this has been to think of my body as “infrastructure”, and remember all the times I’ve “fixed” something but then been wrong.
It’s really the only way I can relate to all these medical professionals.
I see a Certified Yoga Therapist- I started years ago. She knows anatomy better than most doctors (IMO) and I went to her after several epic fails with physical therapists.
Stiff neck and military neck might be the result of stiff shoulders, pulled towards the spine in order to look “straighter” (or simply sitting all the day with the shoulder muscles engaged).
Muscles holding the scapulae tighten up and start holding the thoracic spine “locked” leading to the neck becoming stiff too. The neck and head are supposed to balance the body’s movements out, but with the thoracic spine and ribcage stiffness the whole body becomes rigid. Muscle atrophies start occurring, etc.
I regularly foam roll on a firm black foam roller to help ease back tension over the entire length of my back, & lay on it lengthwise w/ shoulders dropped & arms resting on the floor to stretch my chest muscles & pecs & allow traps, lats & scaps to relax. It never ceases to amaze me how tight everything is at the end of each day. I think part of this is coming from having had two cycling accidents w/ head injuries & a car accident (I was rear-ended) w/ a whiplash injury. These all likely contributed to me ending up w/ ES. My second cycling accident also caused some shoulder damage so my left supraspinatus tendon is now calcified & causing me fits when I try to sleep at night. I’m inconsistently working on stretching & rotator cuff strengthening. Would probably help more if it was consistent. It’s part of the cost of living an active life.
I didn’t get to see my images up close. They’re sending me a soft copy but the chiropractor said he didn’t see anything of note. Will let you know as soon as I have images I can inspect.
@tokenegret Well, I am not sure I possess all the knowledge required to articulate this better than anyone here but many natural phenomenon were understood through Reductionism (Reducing complex issues to small, simpler version so that they can be studied), you can argue all the major science discoveries were made using this Reductionism method but opposite to that is Holism ( Understanding the complexities that arise from many entities interacting with each other continuously or intermittently as whole). The latter is much more difficulty and understanding is sometimes next to impossible. This is because studying complex processes such as human bodies needs time and apparatus to keep track of everything that gets affected/changed when one thing is changed/removed/added. The situation is even worse when you introduce the subatomic particle behaviors of matter since human body is made out of atoms which are made of subatomic particles. Not to mention one’s genes, age, living environment, food habits…etc. the list is infinite when it comes to things that can affect the outcome of what initially seems to be simple intervention. So in a nutshell, it is hard to predict what the behavior would be with any degree of accuracy.
It’s part of the cost of living an active life. 
