If you suffer from sciatic back pain/sciatica and carry your wallet in your back pocket, please stop doing that right away !

This sounds like a very strange thing to say, but let me explain a little further.

When you sit on top of your wallet, two main things happen:

1. Your pelvis shifts slightly

2. A very important muscle in your buttocks can be compressed

3. Scoliosis can be worsened

The following explanation takes a little time, but I can almost guarantee that at least one person out there will gain some benefit from it. Evfen if you don’t carry a wallet, please read this.

Pelvic Shift

Imagine a straight pile of blue books placed on a hard chair. On the very top of the blue books there is a red book.

The blue books represent each of the vertebrae of your spine [ the little “building block” bones that make up the spine ].

The red book represents your head.

Now imagine that under one side only, we put our wallet under the books [ again, under one side only ]. What happens ? Well, the books would probably all shift and tilt [ including the red book ] like the Leaning Tower of Piza.

Does that look like a stable situation ?

By now, you’re probably saying to yourself “ What a load of rubbish, when I put my wallet in my back pocket, my whole body doesn’t tip over !!”.

Ah, but it would, if it were not for one very important fact.
In-built to our brains there is a very important reflex called the “Head Balance Reaction”. Basically this means that the body will do anything it can to keep the head level with the eyes on a level balance. How does it do this ?

Inside our inner ears, there are three circular shaped little hollow bones. Inside these bones there is fluid. Also, inside the bones there are some tiny little hairs attached to nerves, which lead to the brain. Whenever our head is not perfectly level, the hairs bend slightly telling the brain that the head is not level. The brain will then do whatever it can to correct that problem. This is critical in understanding certain elements of scoliosis.

So, back to the wallet. We sit down on a chair. Because the wallet is under one buttock, that side of the pelvis rises up slightly. Just like our blue books, our whole body initially tilts very, very slightly to one side. Just like our red book, our head would begin to tilt slightly to the same side, but is prevented from doing so by the “Head Balance Reaction”.

But hang on a minute, something else must be happening. If our pelvis has tilted and our head is now level, something else must have moved in order for the head to be level. That something is your spinal column. This is not good.

Anything that tilts one side of the pelvis up can cause this reaction.

How do I know this ? Because last year, I had a high right hip. On my x-rays, you could clearly see mild scoliosis [ bending of the spine ] at the base of the spine. Since I have worked on the quadratus lumborum aggresively, my last x-ray [ taken last month ] has shown that my two hips are now almost completely balanced, and my scoliosis is gone.

In many cases of people with scoliosis, it is not a wallet that is doing it, but a very tight muscle called the quadratus lumborum on one side of the body. That is why sorting out these imblances is so important.

Buttock Muscle Compression

Buried under a top layer of muscle in your buttocks is a very important little muscle called the piriformis. Why is it important ? Because the sciatic nerve will either pass under, over or through the muscle. Anything that compresses the muscle is to be avoided. Sitting on a wallet can easily compress the piriformis.

Summary

Anything that tilts your pelvis is not good. If you carry a wallet, please carry it in your front pocket. You’d be surprised just how much junk we carry in there. Remove as much as you can and leave only the essentials [ do I really need to carry those $1 off coupons from Subway ? Do I really need to carry my expired library card ? Do I really need to carry all those business cards ? ].

Hope this helps someone

If you are having pain in your muscles, try putting 2 or 3 cups of epsom salts in a bath of hot water. Try to have the water as hot as you can stand it. Soak in the bath for at least 15 minutes.

If you cannot get into the bath, or don’t have one, try soaking a towel in a basin of hot water and epsom salts [ 1 cup ] and lay the towel on the sore area.

I used to think that using epsom salts on sore muscles was an “old wives tale”, but I am a firm believer in it now.

If you have sciatica, you should try this. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t. Sciatica is very often related to tight muscles and the salts have helped in some cases.

Tight muscles very often cause back pain, and again the salts are worth trying.

After spending six months in a foetal postion, with my knees tucked into my chest, I had to learn how walk all over again. During this time, just about every muscle in my body had seized up and contracted. I had muscle knots all over my entire body. Some as small as little dots and others the size of golf balls. The epsom salts worked wonders for me.

How does it work ? Muscles take in nutrition, work and give out waste products. Even when you are sitting still, your muscles are still in an active state. One of the waste products is called lactic acid. This is the same stuff that makes milk taste sour. Lactic acid is one of the main things that makes muscles sore. When you use the epsom salts, the lactic acid is drawn out by a process called osmosis.

When your brain sends a signal to a muscle, the muscle normally responds. In both cases electrical signals are generated which travel through the nerves.

Even when you are sitting still, the brain sends a signal to the muscles, telling them to assume “normal resting tension”. Without this signal, your muscles would just sort of collapse like a putty. In fact, this is what happens to many people with spinal injuries.

Now, when the muscle has achieved its correct state of tension, it sends a message back to the brain saying “Hey, I’m at the correct tension”. This is what is called a “feedback loop”.

However, if there is a lot of lactic acid in the muscles, the signal going back to the brain gets blocked. At this point, the brain does a rather strange thing. You would imagine that the brain would just say “OK, I’m not hearing from the muscle, I’ll just let things be”. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The brain actually sends a signal to the muscle to increase it’s tension. They are not sure exactly why it does this but the latest thinking is that the brain is almost trying to “squeeze” some sort of response, any repsonse, from the msucle. Again , the brain does not hear from the muscle [ due to the blocking effect of the lactic acid ]so it once again sends a signal to the muscle telling it to increase it’s tightness. This continues until the muscle cannot tighten any more. In reality, the tightness really only continues in the muscle knots that are present, but we can think of this as being throughout the whole muscle.

What this means is that if we can get rid of the lactic acid [ through stretching, trigger-point therapy, rolfing, epsom salts etc ] then the brain can allow the muscle to relax.

Epsom salts by themselves can only do so much, and are not a replacement fro stretching etc, but can help.

The robotic device that I am being treated with, works like this:

The PT first finds a muscle knot. The robot arm presses down on the knot and measures the tension of the muscle. That tension value is then sent to a computer. The computer works out how much pressure to apply. The robotic arm then presses down on the knot for ten seconds then releases. It then re-checks the tension and continues the process over and over for about twenty minutes. You’d imagine that if someone did this to a sore muscle for a long time that it would feel more painful. Actually, it feels a bit sore at the beginning, but as time goes on, it feels less and less sore, as the lactic acid gets pumped out of the muscle.

Dwight Gooden the baseball player was told that his career was over due to the fact that he could not pitch fast enough. Some of the best physical therapists in the states tried to treat him, but to no avail. He was let go. The chap who invented the robotic arm [ Al Meilus ] went to see him. In less than three hours [ by working on a series of knots in his sub-scapularis, a muscle under the shoulder blade ], he not only got his original pitching speed back, but gained another five mph. Sadly, personal issues affected his career later on.

Waylon Jennings, the C+W singer had carpal tunnel syndrome. He had surgery which failed. Unable to play the guitar, he contacted Al Meilus. In one day, Al restored his wrist to enable him to play the guitar again. If you look at old videos of Waylon, he dedicated his first concert playing again to Al.

Billy Joe Hubert of the Saints owes his career to Al for the same reasons.

In fact Al received a patent for his machine by demonstrating the device’s ability to remove lactic acid [ he had to demonstrate this to Lockheed Martin and The Department of Energy, who were his sponsors ]. Basically two groups of people were set up. One group was treated by the robotic device and the second group was treated by a group of physical therapists. Lactic acid levels were measured in the urine of the volunteers before and after treatment. At the end of the treatment, it was found that the levels in the volunteers who used the robotic device were 100 times higher than those using the physical therapists. This means that the device can release knots 100 times more efficiently than stretching alone. He has a U.S. patent to prove this. When I beagn walking again, I was told by physical therapists that it would take about three years for me to be walking and bending normally again. Within four months of using the device, I was walking normally. My bending ability is about 80% – 85% now.

Here’s an interesting fact: if you take a muscle that has been completely stretched and has all the lactic acid removed, you can put an enormous amount of pressure on the muscle and feel almost no pain. I’ve had this done where the therapist has put all his force on my leg and I’ve barely felt a thing. However, that was not the case before treatment.