As an osteopath, Sally Lansdale knew the limits of back surgery full well, so when she developed a herniated disc, she found a safer alternative…

When Sally Lansdale finished her training at the British School of Osteopathy in 1984, little did she realize that one day her own body would take her past the limits of what osteopathy and chiropractic could effectively treat back then.

“I always had back pain,” she says. “Most chiropractors have back problems because of our training. First, you have students practicing on you, and then it’s always a bit dodgy for a while after college when you are first treating patients.”

She didn’t think much about the low-grade chronic pain in her cervical and lumbar regions (neck and low back). Beyond her osteopathic practice, she had an active lifestyle that included a passion for playing tennis and horseback riding.

Then, a series of accidents—a fall off a horse, a windsurfing accident and another accident while skiing—exacerbated the existing problem. She was also in a car accident and experienced whiplash.

“Individually, each accident was nothing serious, but my back pain got worse, and then I developed sciatica,” she says, referring to a pinching of the sciatic nerve that runs from the low back through the hips and buttocks and down the legs.

“Standing up was hard for me, and I was in a lot of pain. When I started to develop pins-and-needles sensations in both my hands and my feet, that got me really worried.”

Sally’s professional knowledge led her to suspect she was developing multiple sclerosis, a highly disabling disease of the brain, spinal cord and central nervous system. She had an MRI scan done and discovered she had bulges in several discs in her neck and lumbar spine.

She immediately started a course of osteopathic treatments, which helped, but she was never far from being in pain. “Doing simple things like just trying to lift the groceries when I would go shopping, it would all come back.”

As her back condition worsened, she began to have to pace herself at work. “I’d see a couple of patients, then do exercises and then get back to work again,” she says. “I walked most mornings to help keep my back going.

“One day, as I was walking along the corridor at work, a patient said ‘You’re limping! You’re worse off than me!’ They were right, I was, but I pretended it was nothing and got on with things.”

To read the rest of this important story on non-surgical spinal repair go here: http://back.ly/Rezzs

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