At RIOT Manual Therapy, we are accustomed to our clients experiencing profound improvement after just a couple of sessions of manual therapy. So when Meredith walked into her first appointment with a herniated disc‌, hunched and in “excruciating pain” and walked out with significant relief from her pain and needed no assistance from her husband, she called her experience miraculous. 

Of course, we know that a combination of education, skill, experience, and a deep understanding of manual therapy leads to the life-changing results our clients experience. But in Meredith’s case, and in the cases of her daughters, who both suffer from scoliosis, the results certainly seem to defy all odds. At RIOT Manual Therapy, we know that the miracle is knowing the body, how it works, how the systems within work together, how to find the source of pain, and then eliminate the underlying cause. 

Meredith’s Path To Finding Relief

Meredith experienced back pain for decades, starting in her twenties, before she herniated a disc in her back. She couldn’t perform her job as a photographer or be the kind of mom she wanted to be. Crawling was her primary mode of transportation, and she couldn’t find a single position that gave her relief. 

The pain became overwhelming, and after an appointment with an orthopedic doctor who recommended surgery, Meredith decided to research other options for healing a herniated disc. Her cousin recommended manual therapy. 

When Meredith realized that the foundational belief of manual therapy is that the body is a single unit that must be addressed as a cohesive system and that manual therapy finds the source of the pain rather than attempting to remove the pain itself, she knew she was in the right place. 

Discovering Manual Therapy

After hearing about manual therapy from her cousin, Meredith scheduled her first appointment and found significant relief for her back pain. Hobbling into the office with the help of her husband, she walked out of her first appointment with significantly less pain and without any help. 

Perhaps most important was her relief at finding a treatment that addresses the root cause of the pain through a whole-body approach. Meredith hadn’t realized that, to some degree, the last two decades of her life, she had a nagging worry in the back of her mind every time she moved, worried that she would throw out her back. She stated that in terms of her worry about hurting her back, she lived her life like “I was living on the precipice.” 

But knowing that a few simple exercises and an appointment at RIOT Manual Therapy could help her restore her back to health helped Meredith grab life again. In fact, she said, “I don’t live in fear of my back being a problem anymore.” Just two months after starting manual therapy, she was able to join her family for her father’s 77th birthday. 

She flew across the country, walked all over New York City, and attended two shows, all without pain. This was a trip she had all but ruled out, knowing that the sitting, walking, and standing would be unbearable. But she enjoyed every minute of it, celebrating her father’s birthday but also her new lease on life. 

Spotlight On Family: Treating Scoliosis

Meredith’s daughters weren’t fairing well with their backs either. Both had major scoliosis, one with a 34-degree curve and the other with a 21-degree curve. Her daughters were young, just around the ages of 8 and 11, when they started their treatment for scoliosis. This treatment included wearing a hard plastic body brace for 16 hours a day, with the hope that the brace would help straighten their spines as they grew. 

The experience was miserable for her young daughters. The brace is strapped on, it is difficult to use the bathroom, and it elicits many questions that the girls don’t like answering. One daughter wore a baggy sweatshirt to hide her brace even in the summer heat. The other developed digestive issues because she refused to use the bathroom at school due to the difficulty of removing the brace. Meredith couldn’t imagine making her daughters use their braces into their teen years. Not only are those years so important for a young woman—the idea of prom in a brace was beyond what her daughters could comprehend. On top of everything else, the doctor appointments and braces were incredibly expensive. 

Each brace cost $3,000, and sometimes both of her growing daughters needed two or three a year. Insurance didn’t cover the cost of the braces, costing the family a fortune. So when she discovered manual therapy for her herniated disc, she decided to try manual therapy at RIOT Manual Therapy for their scoliosis. 

It was time for an experiment. The girls had to get x-rays every three months and meet with their orthopedic doctor. Their next appointment was in a month, and rather than wearing their braces for the month, the girls had appointments at RIOT Manual Therapy and did their home exercises with complete dedication. At the end of the month, after going all in on manual therapy, they would get their X-rays to see if the therapy was effective. The day came for the appointment with the orthopedic doctor.

They told the doctor they did not wear the braces, and the doctor was furious. After the doctor took the scans, he was speechless. One daughter went from a 34-degree curve to a 13-degree curve and the other from 21 degrees to eight in just one month of noninvasive manual therapy. Their curves had reduced so significantly that they wouldn’t be considered scoliosis in a typical screening. In a very subdued tone, the doctor said, “I guess results don’t lie. You can keep doing what you are doing”.

RIOT Manual Therapy: A Holistic Approach To Back Pain

Meredith says, “I joke with my family that the therapists are magicians. But it’s not magic, it’s just actually caring and healing the human body”. We know that to our clients, it often feels like magic, but it’s just the science of the human body finding balance through manual therapy. 

Not only do we love our work because it helps people reduce their pain, but as Meredith says, “I’ve gotten my life back because of manual therapy…I’ve gotten this second lease on life!” We are thrilled to be a part of that process, for Meredith and her daughters. Knowing that her daughters can move through the world with confidence and no more back braces, especially during their teen and young adult years, brings us so much joy and satisfaction. 

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