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Surgery-appropriateness?

Often you will be sent to a surgeon but that approach could be said to be too heavy handed for subtle long term problems. Their skills are appropriate to treat a fracture or other injury from an accident.

Six years ago I suffered a trauma, a spiral fracture shattered my lower leg and ankle and surgeons screwed and plated it and saved my leg. I was very grateful that they had the skills. Prior to leaving hospital my leg needed to be set in a cast. Despite my protests it was set with the foot square to the ground, ankle collapsed in and the leg uncomfortably twisted out of alignment. Returning to my workshop, myself and a Paleontologist who worked as my orthotics technician removed the cast and set the leg with the ankle and knee in correct alignment but the foot in it's inherited excessive angle.

About three months later I removed the cast for the follow up visit with the surgeon. The range of movement of the ankle was limited and he suggested that it would deteriorate and then he would put a screw in it to fuse it. I made a new orthotic to realign the skeletal structure of the entire leg from the ground upwards thus realigning the ankle joint. I knew how but I have great concern for others who go through the system. I began walking and pushing the range of movement. Because I had set it in its healthy alignment it continued to rehabilitate and repair. After a couple of years of walking/running with restricted range of movement, I found I could run without restriction. The ankle is now very functional, in fact as good as new.

From the early days of delving into the texts and actually solving my own running problems where all others had failed, and then beginning to work with other people, I would occasionally wonder whether I was clever or crazy. I can now see I was becoming aware of the gaps in knowledge and rigidity in thinking of the mainstream framework and that they had not delved into the area as I had out of my own sense of desperation. Obviously I had been doing the right study at that time, surrounded by a wealth of texts and journals in the very comprehensive library.

There is no effective rehabilitation in the traditional approach that would have helped me after the trauma. I would normally have been routinely referred to a practitioner who focussed on muscles and believed that they set and control function. They would have prescribed me exercises but the muscles cannot support a rolling foot/collapsing misaligned ankle and in trying to exercise to strengthen it, I would have created wear and probably destroyed the joint. Then the surgeons prognosis would be correct and I would need it fused.

The foot and ankle joint must be aligned in such a way that the ankle is aligned in it's plane of movement for healthy function and the weight of the body acts directly through it. It is not possible to rehabilitate a segment of the leg, e.g. an ankle without attending to the commonly occurring misalignment so as to realign the entire leg and set all joints into their planes of movement to achieve healthy wear/injury free movement.

There is no awareness of the misalignments that are part of a normal human being and of the serious implications. The point is that surgeons do the serious work to save your leg and I personally am very grateful, but since no mainstream groups have an understanding of the actual science of the mechanics of the skeleton they cannot fine tune it to give you healthy function. There is such impressive surgery carried out to repair broken bones, ruptured blood vessels and even nerves but this clever work is undone by the gaps in understanding of the function of the human body in it's posture and movement over the ground. All surgical attempts to make improvements, no matter how well intentioned, make people worse because the complex science of human movement is not their area, brilliant surgical repair is.

Normal healthy human beings have wide variations in skeletal structure not seen in other creatures whose very survival is reliant on speed and agility.

 

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