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Source: Close Up -
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A New Zealand back guru says he has the answer to back pain and can show you how to cure yourself.
Robin McKenzie has released a best-selling book that reveals methods to help alleviate back pain, which at least 40% of New Zealanders suffer from.
Camera operator Terry Williams says that suffering from a bad back and neck is all part of his profession.
"[It feels] like a really bad cramp right in the neck," said Williams, who agreed to be treated by Robin McKenzie after numerous sessions with his regular chiropractor saw limited results.
However, after just one session, Williams says 79-year-old Kapiti Coast physiotherapist McKenzie has fixed him.
"It just went instantly - the niggle's gone from what it was this morning, it feels quite good," says Williams.
McKenzie also treated his neighbour, Judy Morley-Hall, who had suffered leg pain for over a year and had already seen a doctor, an orthopaedic surgeon, had x-rays, MRI scans, and was headed for surgery.
Morley-Hall says she couldn't believe the results of McKenzie's treatment.
"It went as I got up from the floor. I sat down, very tentatively, not believing it could go just like that. In fact it had gone, and I couldn't believe it, I was incredulous."
McKenzie says that back pain is the result of everyday activities, which makes it hard to avoid.
"Bad sitting posture, bending forward all the time, rounding the back... anything that rounds the back for prolonged periods," he says.
McKenzie's ground-breaking methods have won him accolades all over the world and, at one stage, was completely booked up to four years in advance.
However, McKenzie says he discovered his way of treatment by chance when, while working on the Terrace in Wellington, he told a patient to go and lie down in another room while he finished another consultation.
"When I came back, I went in there and looked at Mr Smith and thought 'Oh my God!' Because that position [the patient was lying in] was supposedly very harmful.
"I said to Mr Smith 'how are you feeling?' He says 'this is the best I've been in weeks all the pain's gone out of my leg.'"
From that moment, McKenzie experimented by making patients do extensions (back-bending) moves, and eventually came up with seven exercises to help people fix their own backs.
"Everything we do, we bend forward to do it or we sit and relax and slouch. The spine rounds like that, and it squeezes the soft part of the disc, which can eventually lead to bursting of the ligaments that hold it in. But if you get it early enough, you can reverse it by performing opposite movements.
McKenzie has treated five successive New Zealand prime ministers, including Robert Muldoon and David Lange, but has retired from the profession. However, therapists in more than 30 countries used McKenzie's method, which actively avoids using drugs, surgery, or manipulation.
Once voted the most influential clinician in the field of back-pain in the US, McKenzie has made enemies by insisting that patients be taught to cure themselves.
"We've got to get the message across that people can look after their own backs and clinicians and therapists should be obliged to teach them.
"If a patient out there now is not being taught to look after his problem, he should change his therapist."
McKenzie says that the one thing that would benefit more people in one hit would be to ensure that everyone sits properly.
"People work all day and flex, and they go home in the evenings and slouch in an armchair, completely collapsed, and wonder why the back aches. You need to have a proper supportive cushion in the hollow of your neck, so you can't slouch like that."
