> It is nice to hear such kind words about my beloved profession. Thanks. > > The more I practice, the more I am convinced that a qualified > chiropractor should be the doctor of first choice for almost all health > problems. I know this sounds self-serving and provincial; but our system Ok, I'm now going to put in my $.16 concerning chiropractic (inflation, you know), in the form of a story about what happened to me. During April of 1998, I had a severe car accident. A woman, distraught by the fact that her ex-husband had kidnapped her (and his) kids, and fled to some unknown location, just that morning, plunged into my stopped car at 25 MPH. She was in a 1992 Mustang, I was in a 1997 Saturn. The Saturn did really well, (just like all the ads say :) but my back and especially neck were stiff and sore, so I decided to go to the chiropractor. This is the first time I had ever considered chiropractic, but hey, it was free (from my perspective) and my back did hurt. What could it hurt? My first visit consisted of an X-ray. The X ray showed, rather clearly, which vertabrae were out of sync. Several were, and it was no suprise, but a very extreme case was my atlas, which was so far out of sync that my chiropractor had a collegue look at the X-ray's before we was willing to work on me. The first adjustment included the atlas. After it "popped" (quite loudly, in both directions, I might add), a strange feeling went up and down my body. No numbness or pain -- I just felt some kind of change. In fact, to some extent, I felt the effect of every single adjustment, immediately, to the suprise of my chiropractic doctor. He used "muscle testing" -- a technique to that I was very suspicious of, but he was able to correctly identify pain in my back and neck before I told him about it, and the adjustments relieved it. Well, over the next many months I went in for adjustments, at first often, then occasionally, then rarely. My back and neck were feeling better than they had since and even before the accident. I finally was released. I was having trouble with food at this time, and feeling slightly ill when I ate. I went to a allopathic doctor who told me it might be the ulcer-inducing bacteria. He did a test for it, which was borderline, and sent me off with some powerful anti-biotics, which I took. This is when I went for my trip to Australia. I remember thinking, "damn, can't have a drink when I go!" because I couldn't drink on the medicine. So I came back, and my food allergies (I suspect that's what the problem was from the beginning) just exploded. I didn't know what they were, and wouldn't know for sure for months. But I got sicker and sicker and sicker. Little did I know that I had become allergic to almost all food. I remember that the doctor had mentioned that he could, using muscle testing discover what my food allergies were (at this time I began to suspect that it was food allergies). I went, and he gave me a list. Basically, I didn't believe that it would be correct. And, after I saw the list, I found that I was right. Foods which I knew were big problems were marked "ok", even garlic, after eating it, I had already gone into some kind of shock (one of the clearer allergies!). When my blood tests came in, they corelated nicely with my experience, and for the first time, I realzied that I was allergic to everything. Since then, I've been on the paleo diet, and slowly recovering. Erik