Walk a mile with a pebble in your shoe and you'll limp a little. Walk five years with it and your knee hurts, your hip hurts, your back hurts, and your gait has reorganized itself around a stone the size of a pea. Ben Kuhn uses that picture to explain craniocervical injury, and I've never found a better one. The misalignment is rarely dramatic. The compensating is what wrecks people.
Why do small misalignments do so much damage?
Because of where they sit and how long they stay. A minor positional fault in your mid-back is a shrug. The same few degrees at the top of the neck press on the corridor carrying everything your brain sends and receives, and they press on it every minute for years. Ben describes three kinds of damage: irritated neurology, mechanically stressed tissue, and disturbed fluid dynamics, meaning blood flow and the cerebrospinal fluid that can turn turbulent around a shifted junction. None of the three announces itself early. That's how someone ends up with a whiplash that "healed" years ago doing slow damage in the background, and symptoms that finally surface a long way from the cause.
What does recovery look like once the rock is out?
Mostly it looks like the body doing what it was built to do. Bracing releases. Posture stops fighting itself. Fluid moves the way it should. The doctor's contribution ended with the correction; everything after is the patient's own biology doing what it was always trying to do with a stone in its shoe. Timelines vary with how long the compensations had to set, and concussion-adjacent cases in particular unwind in stages rather than all at once. But the direction of travel changes fast. I tell patients: my job is just to remove the interference. The healing is yours, and your body is good at it.
Who is Ben Kuhn?
Dr. Ben Kuhn practices NUCCA at Providence Chiropractic in Edmonton, Alberta. Call (587) 412-1527.