Everyone told her it was her atlas. That's the reflex in upper cervical circles, because the atlas is the famous bone. But Brent Owens kept running his tests, and the atlas kept coming back clean. Meanwhile the patient was in genuine misery: trigeminal neuralgia on both sides of her face, occipital neuralgia at the back of her head, neuropathy down one arm, burning in her legs that sometimes spread over her whole body. Conventional treatment wasn't reaching any of it. She handed Brent a CD full of MRIs and CTs, and he actually read them.
Why did everyone else land on the wrong bone?
Because the atlas has the reputation. It gets the headlines, so the atlas is where everyone looks first. What separates a diplomate-level workup is the willingness to let the tests overrule the assumption. Brent's objective checks kept clearing the atlas, so he went hunting through her imaging until the answer showed itself at C2. And C2 makes anatomical sense for face pain: the trigeminal nucleus, which processes nearly all sensation from the face, descends through exactly that level of the cord. The anatomy is laid out in Why head and face pain often starts in the neck, along with why so many headache syndromes point back to the same real estate.
Why did this correction hold when nothing else did?
Her theory about herself was wrong. She'd concluded her body couldn't hold adjustments, when really her body had never been offered the correct one. Adjust the wrong vertebra, or the right vertebra along the wrong vector, and of course it doesn't hold; the underlying strain is untouched. Match the correction to the actual misalignment and the body accepts it, because you've handed it a position it can afford to keep. Brent's phrase for the rest is the same one I use: you have to hold it to heal it. The adjustment gets the credit, but the months of staying in alignment afterward are what actually change things.
Who is Brent Owens?
Dr. Brent Owens, DC, DCCJP, practices Blair technique at Cincinnati Upper Cervical and Family Chiropractic in Blue Ash, Ohio. You can reach the office at (513) 891-7746.