It was a week after I got my license. One wrong turn (me), one speeding car (the other guy), and bam — I'd landed in the hospital with two hip fractures, a bruised kidney, and a broken pelvis. I was sentenced to crutches for five months and endured my high school years with the nickname Alyssa Andretti.
About a year later, I began experiencing a pain on the left side of my abdomen. It wasn't in my stomach, it was too high to have anything to do with my ovaries, and a battery of tests ruled out intestinal disorders. Having found nothing amiss, doctors concluded I was plain old constipated. “Eat more fiber,” they said. And that was that.
Sixteen years later, the pain remained — sometimes sharp, sometimes dull. I gave up trying to erase it long ago and instead learned to live with it. Back in high school, no one thought to consider that the discomfort might be related to my accident. But recently, I visited a naturopath who raised this possibility. So I began considering new ways to treat that old injury.
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On the advice of a friend, I ended up at the Newton, Massachusetts, office of Julie Burke, a chiropractor who has practiced a technique called network spinal analysis (NSA) for nearly two decades. Founded in the early 1980s by chiropractor Donald Epstein and used by more than 400 chiropractors across the United States, NSA employs precise, gentle adjustments (no heavy cracking) to reduce tension on the nerve tissues caused by both physical and mental stresses.
Easing this tension allows the nervous system to function optimally and opens the “respiratory wave,” the natural movement of the spinal bones that should occur with each breath. The resulting increase in energy and breathing capacity, say proponents, helps sustain all-around good health.
While Epstein developed NSA for use by chiropractors, there's debate over whether it's a chiropractic method or a separate healing discipline. (NSA isn't recognized as an approved chiropractic technique by some state boards, and some insurance companies don't reimburse for treatment.)
While traditional forms of chiropractic rely on standard manual adjustments, practitioners of NSA use a different technique. “A chiropractic degree is required to study and practice NSA, but NSA must be seen as a different discipline,” says Robert Cooperstein, director of technique and research at
Palmer College of Chiropractic
. Different or not, I'd heard enough good reports that I was eager to give it a try.
