Woman, 32 years old, professional and former Olympic athlete

Reason for consultation

Mid-back and lower back pain

Clinical history

• she has noticed the pain for 3-4 years, especially after long work days
• she has a scoliosis that developed only 5 years ago

Palpation and observation

• widespread pain of the paravertebrals and lower back, especially on the left side
• intercostal pain of the lateral and anterior part.
• with forward flexion of the body the manifestation of her scoliosis is clear, as seen in the image beside.

Diagnosis

The muscular tension of the entire trunk area at the kidney level is very high. This tension in the lower levels of the musculature, primarily the intercostals, creates the rotation of this area of the ribs and the connected vertebrae.

Therapeutic principle

With only one 90-minute session available I would not know what to do using only needles. I chose to try the One Minute Practice.

The One Minute Practice works by relaxing the muscular tensions of the postural muscles so that the body structure realigns naturally. When the body is aligned, the internal organs regain their natural space and recover their normal activity.

The key of the One Minute Practice is to use a specific type of breathing to remove trigger points. Whoever knows the trigger point theory knows how much the body recovers its self-healing power as soon as the trigger points are released. Unlike other techniques based on trigger point theory, here only breathing techniques are used.

Another important point of this practice is that during the session the person is trained to integrate the practice into their daily life to avoid the need for another session, if possible. In extreme cases like this scoliosis it is important that the patient clearly understands what needs to be done; it is not always possible to learn what is needed in one session.

The One Minute Practice website tries to teach us how to work on our own.

Treatment

First steps

10-15 minutes

In a first One Minute Practice session it is essential to learn the proper breathing rhythm and its intensity. Once the person has integrated this rhythm in the key areas, one can move on to address specific cases. If you are interested in learning only how to apply this part of the practice, look at the first steps page of the One Minute Practice.

Addressing the trigger points that create the scoliosis

70 minutes

One after another we look for the main trigger points in the area of her body where the scoliosis manifests. Imagine as if the scoliosis is something we do ourselves. A part of our muscles keeps pulling more than it should and forcing the body into torsion. The application time changes greatly depending on the extent and number of trigger points the body manifests. I consider this a fortunate case because the woman has great ease in concentrating on the breathing, being that she was a professional athlete in her youth.

The "first steps" serve to teach the person how to use breathing to remove trigger points, ideally reaching the point where each breath removes one or more trigger points. Considering that in a case like this we removed about a hundred trigger points, it is easy to understand that the better the breathing quality is integrated, the faster the treatment goes. When working alone it may be that the efficiency of each breath is lower, removing one trigger point in 3-5 breaths, but having time, the results still come.

An idea of how I worked on this case should become clearer by reading the page about the technique for back pain of the One Minute Practice.

Important note

I want to add another note for those who work and live with these physical problems.

The woman had developed her scoliosis after the age of 28 and before that she had been a professional athlete. So it should be noted that her exterior musculature, the supporting one, is almost perfectly balanced and once the body rotation was removed she only has to control on her own that the rotation does not re-create itself (she only has to apply the breathing exercises).

In other cases I have worked on where scoliosis started manifesting from youth, the major postural muscles have developed very asymmetrically. With them the first steps continue to be removing the great amount of trigger points that limit them in movement and create the physical pain but it is highly important that they understand that they have to re-learn how to use the muscles that have remained underutilized and this can take time and dedication. Normally postural gymnastics, pilates or similar can complete the treatment.

Results

At the end of the 90-minute session the scoliosis has reduced very noticeably (look at the image). There remains a bit of rib displacement but it is considered something the patient can do on her own at home.

Later the patient confirmed she would pay attention that the scoliosis would not manifest again and the only thing she has done is to control the trigger points when the back pain began to return (applying the breathing). In this way the back pain did not become acute and the back did not end up twisting.