Every time she stood up to walk, she went backward first. Two or three involuntary steps in reverse before her body would agree to move ahead. This started after a car accident, and by the time she reached Ben Kuhn's office it had a strange, settled permanence, as if her body had settled into it for good. Ben's read on the mechanism: her brain no longer trusted its own map of where her head and weight were, so every attempt to move forward registered as the beginning of a fall.
How does a person forget how to walk forward?
They don't, exactly. The skill of walking was intact. What she'd lost was her brain's confidence in it. Forward motion means committing your weight into space, and your brain only signs off on that when it's confident about where your center of mass sits. That confidence is built largely from upper cervical position data. Corrupt it, as her accident did, and the brain hedges every launch, stepping back to buy time the way you'd steady yourself on a boat. It's a rare, severe presentation of the machinery we described in Why most of your balance comes from your neck, the same machinery behind everyday balance problems and vertigo.
What does her relapse prove?
More than her recovery does. Anyone can call a single recovery a coincidence. But she improved under care, was told the chiropractic "wasn't doing anything" and quit, backslid over months, resumed, and recovered again. You could hardly design a cleaner test of whether the care was doing anything. Ben doesn't tell the story with bitterness toward the other doctor, and I won't either. But it's a good argument for judging care by measured response rather than by prior assumptions about what should work.
The end of the video goes somewhere heavier. Ben describes recovering patients who admit, at a re-exam, that they had been close to ending their lives before care turned. Anyone who treats chronic invisible illness has heard a version of it. If that's where you are, say it out loud to someone today, whatever else you do about your neck.
Who is Ben Kuhn?
Dr. Ben Kuhn practices NUCCA at Providence Chiropractic in Edmonton, Alberta. His office answers at (587) 412-1527.