How holistic strategies eased my chronic pain

One in five Australians suffer from chronic pain. Many suffer in silence, unable to find relief and losing money and hope as they search for answers. In some cases, chronic pain syndromes can be so debilitating they lead to loss of employment, relationships, anxiety and depression. I was a case in point.

I was 26 when it all went to hell. It was 2010 and I was a working as a journalist in north Queensland. I was very fit and active, and a standard week involved playing rugby union, lifting heavy weights and running up to 50km.

A strained leg muscle was the beginning of a three-year odyssey with pain that completely altered the course of my life. The muscle healed, but the pain lingered and spread to my hips and pelvis.

Initially, I tried going down the conventional path of medication and intensive physiotherapy. I was a model physiotherapy patient, doing everything asked of me. The initial diagnosis was “pelvic instability”, which, I was told, was unusual for a man to have.

No matter how many core strength exercises I did, though, my symptoms didn’t improve. The pain got so bad I couldn’t sit at my desk at work without feeling like someone was stabbing burning-hot screwdrivers into my hips. I also tried chiropractors, acupuncturists and a variety of massage therapists, but nothing offered relief.

My hope faded as the pain spread to other areas of my body. Other symptoms such as muscle twitching and shuddering appeared, and I was tested for some neurological diseases that scared the hell out of me. Thankfully, those tests were clear. In fact, nothing really ever showed up on any MRI, X-ray or blood test to explain the predicament I was in.

The pain ended up being so debilitating I was forced to quit work and move to Sydney in search of relief. For the next 12 months I lived in constant pain, going from specialist to specialist and trying a wide variety of conventional and alternative medicine approaches. Nothing helped.

“You’re a healthy young man caught in a rut. You’ll snap out of it,” one doctor told me as he attempted to explain the unexplainable. “Your brain has been conditioned to feel pain, but we don’t know why it does this,” another doctor said.

At times it felt like people didn’t believe me and I began to wonder whether I was going crazy. At my lowest point, my body felt so fragile I couldn’t even push an empty trolley around the supermarket.

As fate would have it, a trip to a Sydney dentist changed everything.

Dr Anthony Ancell is at the forefront of a new approach to healthcare. Over 32 years, he’s developed a holistic system for health known as ortho-postural dentistry. Dr Ancell works with a network of different practitioners to assist him in solving complex health problems. I call them “health detectives”.

After my first appointment with Dr Ancell, he referred me to Colin Clayton, a C.H.E.K practitioner based on Sydney’s North Shore. C.H.E.K is a system of injury rehabilitation and lifestyle reinvention created by American holistic health practitioner, Paul Chek.

I had already been to some of Australia’s top physios and didn’t hold much hope that an injury rehabilitation specialist would help me. Colin Clayton took one look at me, however, and noticed one nostril was partially blocked — the result of several broken noses from my rugby days. Colin explained that C.H.E.K practitioners address injury and illness by working with from a hierarchy of importance.

At the top of their list are the airways. C.H.E.K practitioners believe maintaining optimal airflow through your nose is a top priority of the body, because we can’t survive very long without oxygen. Colin explained to me that my pelvic instability might actually be caused by my nervous system struggling to cope with an airflow imbalance through my nostrils.

“If you’re not breathing properly, it can affect every aspect of your health and I think your nervous system is stuck in overdrive,” Colin told me. “For any other treatment to work, your nasal airway has to be opened up to allow your nervous system to reduce the constant fight/flight response you are stuck in.”

I knew my broken nose had affected my breathing, but I couldn’t have imagined it was contributing to the pain I felt throughout my body. I was referred to a nose surgeon, who said that my nasal passage was blocked and was in need of fixing.

I took a leap of faith and got my nose fixed. Much to my delight, Colin was right and things slowly began to improve for me. First of all, the pain lessened, then I started feeling more stable on my feet. I also began doing exercises to regain pelvic stability and now the exercises were having a positive impact.

It wasn’t a quick solution, though, and the nose was only the start. Colin and Dr Ancell referred me elsewhere to work through other issues they identified. During my journey back to health, Colin Clayton explained the ortho-postural dentistry philosophy in dealing with chronic pain.

“We believe that complex and chronic pain doesn’t just appear out of nowhere,” Colin told me. “Even though the pain may be at a specific site or part of the body, that presentation is not always the root cause of the problem.

“By taking a person’s structure, emotional health, diet and lifestyle into account, we often find multiple factors are contributing. The secret is (in) knowing what to address first and who to refer you to so we can put the health jigsaw back together.”

My journey back to health involved retraining my nervous system, improving my breathing and diet, and completely changing my approach to exercise. I also realised how much of an impact emotions such as fear and anger were having on my health.

Eighteen months after walking through Colin Clayton’s door, I am back at work and running again (something I thought I’d never be able to do). Before this episode of my life, I was very sceptical of anything that wasn’t prescribed by a doctor. But I’ll never think of my health the same way again.

Obviously, not everyone with a chronic health condition has a broken nose, but I’d encourage people to be open-minded about the root cause. If you aren’t getting resolution through conventional therapies, perhaps it’s time to think outside the square. Nothing was as it seemed with me.