About

This site is not meant as an advertisement for my professional services, nor to provide specific medical advice to any individual. The content on these pages is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be used in the place of a visit, consultation or the advice of any medical, allied health or other professional.

The blog is primarily a history of my personal long road to recovery and the steps I have had to take to get there when I could not rely on standard medical thinking. It also directly addresses the nature of consciousness. I am a Buddhist and understand Buddhism as the scientific study of consciousness with a view to achieving the Perfections of Introspection, Patience, Zeal, Meditation (attention) and Wisdom as described so well in the Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life.

In short the study of the medical concept labelled “Attention deficit Disorder” and the Buddhist concepts labelled suffering and the six perfections, are two sides of the same coin.

Main sub streams in this blog include the actual core material relating to posture and attention, and its relationship to good health, meditation, the misclassification of illnesses and the obstructions to good health emplaced by the medical bureaucracy. The other major stream of thought will deal with the flaws in a behavioural classification of psychiatric and “psycho-somatic” disorders when we should be focussing on actual symptoms and disabilities and their underlying neurology and chemistry.

Current medical systems of thinking are muddled and the enormous overlaps between, say ADHD, and fibromyalgia cause enormous confusion for all. I will use fibromyalgia as a paradigm for this conversation, as I have enough personal knowledge of people with it and have had studied it and had previous clinical experience.

I  worked all my working life as an Australian general  practitioner. I retired and cancelled my registration due to my own health problems in 2019. Though the treatment I had of my spinal issues starting in 2009 was very helpful, it came too late to avoid significant complications.
Earlier posts in this blog may not reflect the turbulent course to recovery that I have experienced.

The question of spinal subluxations and their role in health complaints beyond localised pain problems still excites a good deal of controversy and hostility in the medical profession, at least within Australia and the US. For this reason I preferred  to preserve my anonymity.

I have started this blog out of gratitude for the help I had already received, as a response to my own experiences as a patient and in response to my many unanswered questions as to what was going on, and why it was working, or not working when I hit a snag.

The blog has been a work in progress as the neurological and biomechanical implications of malalignment in the upper cervical spine are very complex and it has not been not easy to find  comprehensive information on the subject. Equally the spinal malalignments in question are described under different names by different professions. The blog has brought me into contact with the information I needed, but it has taken time.

Some of the synonyms of the orthopedic/ chiropractic aspects of the problem are: “sub occipital strain”, atlas subluxation, upper cervical subluxation complex, craniocervical instability.
I prefer to use the term atlas subluxation- out of respect for the chiropractors, who correctly identified the problem about a century before anybody else.

As of the early 2000’s we now have hard radiological confirmation of these problems (through upright MRI) and we also have hard radiological proof of impairment of cerebrospinal and venous drainage of the skull caused by these problems. These aspects lead to localised brain damage due to cerebrospinal fluid  pressure back jets, and to venous congestion ion the rain. We have good reason to believe that these dynamics are major drivers of neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease, ALS etc. Note that all of these conditions have multifactorial causation though and they may not manifest in an individual who has good detoxification genetics or has well balanced autonomic and immune function.

My history is that for many years I suffered from back and neck pain, poor sleep, drowsiness, and increasing mental fog. I and sought conventional treatment through doctors and physiotherapists, but never really achieved anything better than temporary symptom control. Despite the treatment I received I was progressively deteriorating, and developing a wider range of symptoms that did not seem connected to my back or neck problems. By late 2009 I was so compromised by so many diverse symptoms that I  seriously wondered if I would be able to continue working. Given that I was less than 50 years old at the time, this presented quite a problem. I had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder in 2008.

In December 2009 I encountered an advertisement for a new mobilisation technique for the upper cervical spine called Atlas Profilax. I had the treatment shortly thereafter and was greatly impressed not only by the immediate improvement in my neck and back pain, but also by a range of wider health benefits- in particular improved alertness and concentration. Equally the enormous list of biological effects seemed to be too good to be true and it was not easy to link up to a solid knowledge base.

However, despite the claims of Atlas Profilax to be a one off treatment, my experience has been that considerable body work, and neurological rehabilitation has been required to get full benefit of the correction of the subluxation. There have been significant issues with chronic dysfunctional movement patterns that needed to be overcome as well as problems with arthritic change caused by years of poor posture.

As time has progressed it has also become clear to me that upper cervical malalignments may be primary or secondary to malalignment elsewhere in the spine, and may set up feedback loops between the upper cervical spine and other parts of the spine. They may sometimes even to metabolic issues. Spinal alignment is maintained by the balance (vestibular) system, which is the most metabolically active part of the brain, so this is no surprise.

However one issue that has become more and more clear is that upper cervical malalignments directly impact the information that reaches the brain stem and can cause serious down stream problems in brain function as our system struggles to cope with distorted information that does not match on the left and right side. There are also issues related to direct mechanical distortion of the brainstem and compromise of drainage of both cerebrospinal fluid and venous blood from the skull.

While this blog initially emphasized issues at C0-1 (the joint between the skull and the atlas) is is clear that C0-1-2 should be regarded as a functional unit and that issues of distorted information can arise from the positioning of any of these joints and the resting tension of any of the suboccipital muscles. This will be dealt with at greater length later.

It is clear to me now that in my case the initial problem was direct birth injury to the upper cervical spine, complicated by a whiplash injury when 25 years old. It is also clear to me that the ill effects of this injury were worsen by excessive desk work and excessive emotional stress, with all its postural impacts. It all would have been greatly reduced by timely chiropractic intervention.

Unfortunately the conventional medical profession has been very efficient at suppressing information about chiropractic treatment and calling it pseudoscience. My experience as I have researched the area is that far from being a pseudoscience, chiropractic is supported by a very considerable body of research. That body of evidence is not exclusive to chiropractic, but underpins virtually all manual therapy traditions including conventional physiotherapy. There has been extensive evidence collected by conventional medical practitioners, especially in Central and Eastern Europe.

Clearly the time has come to accept evidence that is more targetted and small scale than large scale drug trials, to work out ways to increase cross profession interactions and to increase our awareness of research from non English speaking nations as well as cross disciplinary research.
The time has also come to dismantle the medical bureaucracies that are causing so much harm.