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Hello. The topic of my lecture tonight came out of a conversation I had with Becky
Johnson. We were talking about being in therapy - about ME being in therapy and I mentioned
that one of the things that often gets discussed during my sessions is what it s like to have
an invisible problem. Becky immediately suggested that this be my Trampoline Hall lecture topic,
which terrified me, but here I am. Invisible problems. We all have them: a headache, a
nightmare, a broken heart. Have you been abducted by aliens? Do you live in a haunted house?
Some invisible problems are more easily understood than others. Some are quantifiable. The wind,
for example, is an invisible problem if it blows you over. But wind can be witnessed.
It can be felt by others. Its affects can be seen and heard. It can be measured. What
I d like to focus on are invisible problems whose existence can t be so easily proven.
Here s an example: the Windsor Hum. As you may have heard in the news, the federal government
recently announced it would be committing $60,000 to help two universities (the University
of Windsor & Western University) to investigate a mysterious humming vibration in Windsor,
ON. Studying the hum, much less locating the source of it, presents a challenge. It is
difficult to capture the mainly nocturnal sound on tape since it doesn't hum all the
time. The team of researchers are going to use low-frequency microphones normally used
to detect infrasound. Infrasound is sound that occurs below the normal hearing range.
The Windsor hum has been described as: the sound of an idling truck, a train, or the
bass vocals of Barry White. Not only does no one know what it is but some doubt it exists
at all. The Windsor Hum has a twitter account. Recently it tweeted an interesting question:
I wonder why people who are not affected trivialize the lives and experience of those who are
affected? Why, indeed. This isn t a unique situation. Hums have been widely reported
in both the UK and the US and have been declared a collective phenomena. One theory is that
the problem stems from people focusing too keenly on innocuous background sound; that
sufferers' hearing has become over-sensitive. As one doctor explained: The more people focus
on the noise, the more anxious and fearful they get, the more the body responds by amplifying
the sound, and that causes even more upset and distress." Invisible problems My brother
had an imaginary friend as a child, well, not a friend, an imaginary older brother.
He explained to me that we never saw our older brother because he was a robber and was in
jail. Apparently our parents never talked about him because they were embarrassed. This
imaginary family member became an invisible problem for me as I began to worry about his
eventual emergence from jail. all imaginary problems are also invisible problems but not
all invisible problems are imaginary ones and can you always tell the difference? This
past May an MP in Iceland arranged for the relocation of a 30-tonne boulder because he
believed it to be home of three generations of elves. He had the boulder saved and moved
onto his property when the highway near its original location was widened. Before moving
it an elf specialist was called in to speak with the boulder s inhabitants and make sure
they approved of the move since the unwanted disturbance of elf homes has been reported
to be the cause of disastrous accidents. The elves approved as long as their new location
had grass since they wanted to have sheep. The boulder was moved by ferry. My primary
invisible problem began about 17 years ago but to explain it I need to go back to when
I was 13. That s the age I was when I moved from Lethbridge Alberta to Winnipeg in order
to begin professional training at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School. Within the first year
of attending, injuries began. They came out of nowhere. It was my left ankle. I never
fell. I never twisted it. It just started to hurt. I started going to physiotherapy
and was diagnosed with tendonitis. Now, this problem wasn t invisible, just mysterious.
The inflammation was obvious. As was the scar tissue building up. It could be seen on an
MRI. No amount of treatment helped. No amount of ultrasounds or ice or heat or anti-inflammatories.
Certainly not the cortisone they injected. This was when I learned the art of being in
pain without showing it. It s a skill required by all dancers. I became a master at it. I
had to. Competition in the school was intense. Girls were kicked out every year and quickly
replaced. But eventually, the jig was up. I wasn t able to dance en pointe without my
ankle swaddled in tape and since physiotherapy was done in-house my teachers knew how often
I visited. They were worried my tendon would snap and that, if they allowed me to continue,
they would be held responsible. They finally kicked me out at the end of grade 11. I wasn
t ready to give up. I spent the following year seeing whatever specialists I could find
and eventually ended up in Victoria, BC, in the home office of Steffen Stinner. The easiest
way to explain the work that Steffen did is to call him an osteopath, though he also threw
in some chiropractic techniques, some acupressure, and things that only he did. He had become
well known for helping people with chronic pain who had been written off by other professionals.
When I walked into his office he looked me over quickly and said, s your neck. I explained
about my ankle and he said I understand, but your ankle isn t actually the problem, it
s your neck. I could see it the minute you walked in. he continued. ve never seen anything
like it. Look: your collarbone is crooked. Has no-one ever pointed that out to you? No
one had. And indeed when I relaxed my body and looked in the mirror my collarbone slanted
down to the right. It was rare for me to look at myself in the mirror while relaxed. For
so many years the mirror s purpose had been as a reference for proper technique. I would
normally look and immediately straighten myself without thinking. To relax required thought.
Steffen investigated further. He made comments about the base of my spine, my sacrum. He
said that various mis-allignments had caused my uterus to be tilted and that correcting
it would mean the end of excruciating menstrual cramps. He was right about that. After his
treatments they immediately disappeared and never returned. He said that my alignment
was also torqued. That some muscles were overworked while others were barely working at all. He
explained that while it might appear that one leg was longer in fact it wasn t, it just
seemed that way because of how my pelvis was sitting. He also explained that in order to
make this shamble of a structure do ballet my body had been doing some pretty intricate
compensating that the building pressure was continually offloaded from one place to another
all the way down until it hit that ankle and had nowhere left to go. So that s where the
pain sat. I spent a summer in Victoria seeing Steffen. Once the treatments were over and
he felt like it was safe for me to start dancing full time again I moved to Montreal. For 2
years things were pretty great. The ankle pain never came back. But then shoulder pain
started to creep in. And then, very suddenly, *** got crazy. It started in ballet class.
I mindlessly cracked my stiff neck but immediately noticed that the crack felt much deeper than
normal. Then I felt dizzy. I sat down for the remainder of class. While walking home,
I was overcome by the sensation that the centre of my body was slowly shifting to my right
side. I remember suddenly having to concentrate in order to walk. I had to look at my feet
to direct them forward. It felt like my left side was twisting away from my right and that
I had to, literally, hold it on to the rest of my body. It felt as though if I didn t
actively hold my left arm, cradle it into my body like in a sling, it might float away
The fact that I knew this was impossible didn t make the feeling go away. My body felt chaotic
and unreliable. It was impossible to relax. Gravity wasn t obvious anymore, at least not
internally. When I sat in a chair my impulse was to hold myself onto it. Later it would
be explained to me that these problems were related to proprioception. That somehow my
normally innate sense of my body s placement in space had been broken. As the great neurologist
Oliver Sacks explains, proprioceptive disorders are all to often seen as trivial and devoid
of scientific, therapeutive and even human interest despite the fact that they have the
profoundest central effects on the primary consciousness of a person Proprioception is
important, but invisible. After about a week of these symptoms I ended up in the hospital.
I had been lying in bed holding onto my neck because it felt like it might break off otherwise
when suddenly the most intense pain I ve ever felt shot out from the top of my spine and
it felt like my skull was shifting under my skin. The doctors who saw me called it an
extreme migraine, they filled me with morphine and sent me home with steroids. When I saw
my local chiropractor he did a bunch of muscle testing and then just stared at me saying
m at a loss. Your body doesn t make sense to me. So this was the beginning of my invisible
problem. I stopped dancing immediately and I never went back to it. I couldn t. I moved
from Montreal back to Lethbridge where I lived with my father for the first time since I
was 13. The symptoms settled but never left. I ve had treatments of all kinds. I ve traveled
to Arizona, Colorado, LA, and seen people in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan plus of course
Montreal and Toronto. Everyone is always perplexed. I m always a puzzle to solve. According to
Western medicine I have fibromyalgia. Chronic pain and fatigue with no cure. It s something
that is theorized, not proven. Ideas set forth by osteopaths and the like are quickly dismissed
by western medicine and well, by a lot of people I know. Most people look at a crooked
collarbone and say with a sigh, well, no one s perfectly symmetrical. So, like the Windsor
Hum I fund research into my invisible problem whenever I can. I call on people with special
training to try and find the source. Maybe the answer is near, maybe it s just a matter
of finding the right set of tools. Or maybe it will always remain a mystery.
Question: What is osteopathy? the practice of manual and manipulative therapy which emphasizes the interrelationship between
structure and function of the body and recognizes the body's ability to heal itself. it is the
role of the osteopath to facilitate that process.