Intro
We can agree that the human body is a wonderment. Something complicated, difficult, and unique. A mystery that might never be solved. And yet maybe, just maybe, it is such a
mystery and so complicated because we are looking at it wrong. Maybe we are looking at the problem from a skewed lens that is only seeing a partial and distorted image of the whole picture.
This is the problem I have with our current healthcare system.
We are doing it wrong.
We have missed an area of the body that should have been more explored, but instead, we started looking at the body with a smaller and smaller lens. We started putting more emphasis on microbiology, genetics, and pharmacology. We started to rely on medication so much that the industry became one of the largest and most lucrative in the world.
Can you remember a time when you weren’t given a prescription for a problem you had?
Even with our impressive array of medical advancements, little has changed. We continue to experience many of the same ailments, if not more, with few explanations that help us understand or address our issues. Worse, many medical professionals seem unable to fix the problem or explain it in layman’s terms. Einstein believed that even elaborate concepts must be made as simple as possible, which is one reason I suspect that any answer to a medical problem that rests solely on a molecular level is likely the wrong answer. When someone truly understands a problem, they are not only able to fix it, but can also put the problem into simple terms.
I have created a revolutionary method not only for evaluating the human body but also explaining the symptoms that arise. This new approach allows me to offer explanations and solutions for a wide array of symptoms that the medical world fails to explain or provide answers for.
In this book, I will explain the areas in which our current healthcare system falls short, and more importantly where I believe they are operating under false assumptions. Most importantly, I will explain the area of the body that I believe has been overlooked and the results that came from my exploration of this region. Finally, I will talk about where we need to go next in order to fix the mistakes we made and are still making in healthcare.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Who am I? My name is Caleb. I am an expert orthopedic physical
therapist who has dedicated fifteen years to the field of orthopedics. During this time, I would describe myself as aggressively pursuing continued and higher levels of education in order to better treat, not just my patients, but also seek answers for my own health issues.
I do not use the word “expert” lightly, as I feel too many people do these days. Since receiving my doctorate in this field, I have obtained four advanced certifications in the field of orthopedic physical therapy.
Years of continuous study and practice, in addition to hundreds of hours of courses, lectures, workshops and classes, have honed my skills as a musculoskeletal expert.
On top of all that, I also married a physical therapist who has degrees in the field of women’s health, orthopedics, and geriatric medicine. And if that wasn’t enough immersion into the world of physical therapy, my wife and I started our own practice, which resulted in long hours but solidified the idea that physical therapy was—and is—my life. For the past fifteen years, a single purpose has driven me: How can I better treat my patients? How can I cure their ailments faster and more effectively?
But the answers to my questions fell short. By doing what I’d been trained to do, I kept applying partial treatments and getting partial results. Nothing I did ever fully addressed the underlying issues. But I never stopped asking questions or seeking answers. When one treatment delivered mixed results, I went on to the next. Where appropriate, I implemented the newest technologies in the field of pain relief and musculoskeletal treatment and continued observing medical procedures and outcomes, benefits, and limitations in my fevered quest to find something that would be the treatment.
For a while, no real answer presented itself, although more and more of my treatments were effective. My patients were responding more quickly with more overall relief, so I kept pursuing the same three questions: How to make patients better, more quickly, and more completely. More and more the answers seem to lead to one area. One area that has been treated for over 2000 years and we still have little idea on how it actually works.1
This area is the spine.
I believe the spine has been overlooked in modern medicine, and that the right treatment of the spine has a far greater impact on the overall health of the human body—far more than we realize.
With this idea and this treatment approach, I have had significant successes where others have failed, and we have treated conditions in a way that no other medical professional would dream of tackling.
Our approach is not only effective, but it also gets to the root of the real issue without slapping a pharmaceutical Band-Aid on it.
For these reasons and others, I decided to write this book. Information is meant to be shared. Treatment this groundbreaking must become commonly known and available.
Over the next chapters, I map out areas of the current healthcare system that are lacking and I will explain my treatment approach by showing you real life examples of patients with ailments ranging from common orthopedic problems to rarely seen conditions. By focusing on the spine and showing patients a new way to look at their bodies, I was able to do something that healthcare largely fails at. I was able to address the cause, not just the symptoms.
Why the spine? Because nearly everything in your body has a nerve innervation that starts in your spine at a specific vertebral level.
What that means is nerves come from your spine, attach themselves to other parts of you, and help provide information such as whether that particular part of your body is hot or cold, stretched or shortened, able to contract or relax, and whether pain is present, or damage has been done.
This is the function of your nerves.
They branch out and connect to almost everything in your body in one splendid neural network. But if those nerves aren’t working properly, the information they relay can be wrong, delayed, or absent.
Picture the nerve that comes out of your spine and goes down your leg, into your thigh, and connects to the muscle. That nerve tells the muscle how fast to turn on and turn off. Now, imagine that signal is like the internet. If you have good connectivity and good signal speed, then everything is fine, and you are happily watching Netflix, clicking through Amazon Prime, or texting back and forth with your friends. But if your internet is faulty, then your Netflix stream keeps buffering—pausing, reloading, or not playing at all.
Same goes for that nerve attached to your leg muscle. If the nerve gets damaged or too much pressure is applied or you’ve stretched it too far, then the signal gets delayed.
Imagine what would happen if your quadriceps, the thigh muscle, didn’t turn on as strong or as quickly as it should. How long would it take for symptoms to arise? What might those symptoms look like?
Now, extrapolate that to every part of your body: lungs, stomach, shoulder, feet, pancreas, intestines. Any part of your body could potentially have this problem, and the results would be completely different from one another. In one area, you might have knee pain, but in another it might show up as difficulty breathing or stomach pain.
In this next chapter, I will highlight one of our more interesting cases, which involves treating patients with Crohn’s disease and Crohn’s like symptoms. Up until this point, Crohn’s has been viewed almost entirely as an inflammatory problem. The traditional management is dietary changes and strong medication that is taken for long periods of time, if not for life.
But through our slightly different lens we were not only able to offer a better explanation for these symptoms, but also provide complete and lasting relief within a few short weeks.
Recall the number of times you have mentioned problems like knee pain, difficulty breathing, acid reflux, or pain in your feet to anyone in the healthcare field. Did your doctor ever tell you it might be coming from your spine? Did he or she examine your spine and treat it to see if your symptoms disappeared? Probably not.
This has been our approach, one we have continued to hone over the past few years, and the results are groundbreaking. These results should challenge the current medical regime and its approach to evaluation and treatment of most conditions.
I realize these are bold claims. You might be feeling a little skeptical, maybe confused. It’s good to be skeptical, and I certainly understand why you might be confused. But let me explain this revolutionary approach in a rational and detailed way, one that will answer any questions or doubts you may have. My goal is to have you think to yourself, this makes sense to me, which is what happens to our patients when they see results unfold.
Give me five chapters to make my case and prove to you that what I’m saying is true. I believe our current healthcare system is flawed and that my new way of looking at the human body and its treatments needs to be a much bigger part of modern medicine. Yes, I realize this sounds farfetched, but I expect to present this information and actual cases in a way that will convince you.
I am the first to admit that up until this point in time, physical therapy has been anything but interesting. Compared to most other branches of medical science, physical therapy is...well, boring. Surgeons are replacing human hearts and geneticists are cloning sheep. Meanwhile, physical therapists are helping patients do straight leg raises and perform calf stretches using stretchy bands.
Yawn.
It’s time for a change. Here we go.