Client presenting with daily chronic headaches. She has a history of vertigo and has been diagnosed with vestibular migraines. She doesn’t currently have vertigo but has a constant headache. The pain starts in her sinuses and around her nose and then moves to the back of her head. Many headaches are due to skull bones being slightly misaligned.

Assessment of her skull bones showed that the left side of her face was very slightly flatter than the right side; her jaw had shifted slightly to the left, while her occiput (the bone at the back of the head) had shifted slightly to the right. Her left cheekbone was prominent compared to the right. Her atlas (top neck vertebra) was shifted to the left, and her axis (the second neck vertebra) was shifted to the right.

I used acupuncture for stress relief and sinus treatment, and I used spontaneous muscle release techniques almost exclusively for manual therapy to address the skull bones and neck muscles. She had no headache when we finished. When she came in for her second treatment, she said that the constant daily pressure in her sinuses was gone, and she now only has occasional twinges of headaches. 

Client presenting with pain in his right elbow. During the first treatment, we identified several muscles that seemed to be the culprit, but the relief didn’t last long after the treatment.

During the second treatment, I noticed that the strained muscles were on either side of the radius (one of the bones in the forearm.) I followed the radius bone down to its other end and found that it was completely stuck at the wrist. If a long bone can’t move correctly at one end (the wrist in this case), it won’t be moving correctly at the other end (the elbow.)

I used acupuncture needles in the opposite elbow, spontaneous muscle release techniques to free up the wrist and forearm bones, and trigger point therapy on the muscles around the elbow. When he returned for a third treatment, he reported only a slight twinge of pain remaining in his elbow. 

A client recently came to see me for full-body Swedish massage. She reported that she had recently had various treatments for varicose veins, so I knew the massage would need to be extremely gentle on the calves. She also reported some residual general muscle pain in her calves that she attributed to the varicose vein treatments.

Her calf muscles were extraordinarily tight. Assessment showed that she had significant fascial twists in various directions in both calves. I used spontaneous muscle release technique to gently release the fascial twists so I could perform gentle massage. On her second treatment she reported that her calf pain had almost completely gone away by the next day. She said that her body felt “very understood!”