Pain in the Butt

Yesterday I had my first ever visit to a chiropractor to address my piriformis syndrome (yes, I correctly diagnosed my own butt pain) and the neck pain that has been bugging me since our car accident last week. He did what I guess was a preliminary assessment, gave me some exercises to do to help with the piriformis, and asked me to come back on Friday to deal with my neck.
It was a very interesting experience, unlike any medical treatment I've ever had. He started out by asking me a bunch of questions and then had me stand up with my shoes off and looked at, I think, the overall alignment of my body. He then did a bunch of interesting things like assess my knee tracking (bad), check my balance (bad), and compare strength and flexibility on the two sides of my body.

Now for the really interesting part. He spent quite a few minutes doing this very crazy thing which he called "applied kinesiology." Basically, he asked me to make a movement with a body part to isolate a particular muscle or muscle group, and resisted the movement with his hand to determine, he said, if my muscles were firing properly. According to the doctor, I should be able to resist the force he was applying on every single exercise because it was not a strength thing, and he wasn't applying much force. At one point, though, he found a few leg motions during which I was not able to work against his resistance. He proceeded to poke me in a few places along the front of my thigh, and had me try again. And somehow, magically, I could suddenly resist the force he was applying against my movement. To further baffle me, I suppose, he had me jump up and down on the ground, then try again. I could not resist. Then he poked me again. I could resist! What was going on?!?!

I went back to my office and Googled "applied kinesiology," and most of the websites I found were articles explaining exactly why it's a crock of poo. I'm not so quick to judge, though. I fully believe that my body (and all of existence, really) works in ways that I don't yet and may never really understand, but I still want to try to understand it. One of the very fascinating arguments against AK, as they called it, was that my ability to resist my doctor's force had nothing to do with the precise locations where he administered pokes, and everything to do with my belief that he had somehow made me stronger by poking me. This phenomenon, called ideomotor motion, is in my opinion a hundred times MORE exciting than the idea that he somehow reset the energy along my meridians...or whatever he said he was doing. If the two of us believing that he was making my muscles work better did in fact make them work better, that is pretty powerful stuff!!

I have so many questions for this doctor, but he seemed a little rushed, and I'm not sure he's into patient education all that much. I can't blame him, really. He had patients lined up practically out the door of his small clinic. I even saw Simon Whitfield, a professional triathlete, leaving the clinic as I was going in. Next time, I think I will ask the doctor to poke me exactly where he pokes Simon.