Glossopharyngeal neuralgia is one of those diagnoses you wouldn't wish on anyone. For this patient it meant spasms in her esophagus and the back of her throat, and episodes where her ear would pull down toward her shoulder. Gabapentin, the standard play, wasn't helping. It was her father who went hunting on the internet and found Clark Benson's office. Over the next two years she needed three corrections. That was the entire course of care.
Why would the neck matter for a cranial nerve problem?
It's a matter of geography. People hear "cranial nerve" and picture something sealed inside the skull, out of anyone's reach. But the nuclei that run those nerves sit in the brain stem, and the brain stem runs right through the atlas on its way to becoming the spinal cord. A misalignment there can lean on that neighborhood mechanically and through its effects on local blood flow. Give an irritated nerve center two years of quiet, and it can finally settle. The same geography is why face pain so often traces below the skull; we walked through that anatomy in Why head and face pain often starts in the neck.
Notice the sparseness of the care, too. Three corrections in two years is remarkably little treatment. Each one held for months, and those long stretches of staying in alignment are where the recovery happened. If her doctor had adjusted her at every visit whether she needed it or not, I doubt this story ends the same way.
What changed her physician's mind?
It wasn't an argument that changed his mind. It was a patient. Her doctor watched the medication fail and then watched three gentle corrections succeed, in a patient he knew well. Clark makes a point at the end of the video about the physicians who encourage their patients to stick with this care, and he wonders aloud where those patients would be without that encouragement. I wonder the same thing weekly. The wall between our professions is mostly unfamiliarity, and it usually takes a patient both doctors know to bring it down. Chronic neck pain referrals started the same way in my office.
Who is Clark Benson?
Dr. Clark Benson, DC, DCCJP, practices at the Spinal Institute of Health in Platteville, Wisconsin. The office line is (608) 348-7771.