Healing Through Breathing: My Journey with Osteopathy

---

How a Back Injury Damaged My Breathing and Entire Health for Over a Year

In 2023 I had the unenviable experience of picking up a light dumbbell at home and having what honestly felt like an 11 out of 10 on the pain scale shoot through my lower back. Dropping to the floor as hot electric pain radiated outwards from my lower spine at every micro-movement, I felt my muscles spasming and I was frozen in agony, on my back on the living room floor, unable to move. The wind was knocked out of me, and I could not call upstairs to my wife for help.

So many thoughts rushed through my mind as I lay there paralysed by pain. The only position I could be in was with both knees bent and my feet firmly planted on the floor. Any effort put through my lower back triggered brutally sharp pain shocks and I found myself stifling screams just to stay still. In time I calmed myself down. Breathed slowly and listened to my racing heartbeat gradually slow down. Inch by inch I managed to roll over onto all fours, still in terrible pain, and used anything I could lean on to get upright and walk upstairs to get help. It was the culmination of something that had been going on in my body that I had no idea was there.

Let me explain. 8 months earlier I had slipped 4 times in a row walking downhill in the snow. I am an Osteopathic Manual Practitioner in Coquitlam and Port Moody now but at the time I was working in a local gym and my walk downhill to the station in this beautiful mountainous neighbourhood was the highlight of my day. This particular year we had two big snowfalls, and I was loving it. Growing up in England we rarely get that much snow, so it was exciting.

Wrapped up toasty warm and donning my hiking shoes, which I soon learned had the worst designed soles on the planet, acting more like ice-skates than grips (brand not to be named and shamed for obvious reasons,) I was merrily crunching my way through the deep snow one morning. When I got to a particularly steep section my feet literally just flew from beneath me and I landed on my hips and back and thrust my hands behind me trying to cushion the fall. Ouch! I got up, mainly feeling pain in my hands and wrists. Brushing the snow off myself, I set off walking and immediately slip onto my back again, followed by not one but two more falls onto my bum, back, hips, you name it. I lay there on the fourth fall simply laughing at the spectacle I must have appeared and also in shock. Hearing footsteps crunching through the snow, I turn to my left and watch a lady walking down the hill in office shoes having no problems whatsoever. So much for my winter footwear! Eventually I managed to get upright and slowly make my way down the hill and off to work.

The fun didn’t end there. My lower back, hands, wrists and even my ankles and feet began to ache constantly throughout the next 8 months. At first, I assigned the aches in my wrists and hands to the fall because I instinctively tried to cushion each slip with them, and they hit the ground hard. I dismissed the aches in my ankles and feet as my body adapting to living on a steep hill. Then my neck started to ache on the right side, and the movement was restricted. Months passed by and the aches were still present, so I begin to consider whether I had arthritis.

My body felt off. Misaligned somehow but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. After decades of working out and having great cardiovascular fitness, I was suddenly getting out of breath merely walking up hills and stairs and doing exercise that I was normally conditioned for. I then assigned the blame to being a year older but I carried on giving my best efforts as always. But something clearly wasn’t right.

My Heart Rate Variability (HRV) plummeted from a healthy 80 to an average of 20 to 30. I developed colds and flu more regularly and even Covid for the second time in a year, having never had it before. My headaches, which had diminished in frequency in recent years, came back with a vengeance more regularly. At one point my hearing in one ear even went muffled for about two weeks. I also noticed that my digestive health was nowhere near as strong as before – I had frequent low stomach acid, bloating and indigestion – whereas previously I had been known and proud to have the proverbial ‘iron stomach.’ To top it all off, my moods were off, and I felt less motivated and more depressed than usual. In short, I was a wreck.

One of my main concerns was the change in my breathing. In my youth I had asthma but had got rid of it with regular cardiovascular exercise and using inhalers was a thing of the past. Now though, exercise became much tougher, even when practicing yoga and in a relaxed state. I would get this sensation bodily sensation of being desperate for oxygen when exhaling during any type of physical activity, gasping to breathe in quickly to get air fast or it felt as though I was going to drown. Whenever I did some kind of compression of the body like a Child’s Pose, rotating my trunk or bending forward to stretch my hamstrings, I would feel like my diaphragm was impinged and get a desperate panic for oxygen like I was about to suffocate. My heart rate would soar and then plummet randomly, palpitating during moderate exercise and giving me dizziness during easy physical activities. I went through all the possibilities that might be causing this. Age. Angina. Some kind of heart or lung disease. It was a total mystery.

Fast forward to about 8 months after my falls on the snow, I’ve had over a week of excruciating back pain and near immobility from picking up the dumbbell, and I finally manage to get an appointment with an osteopath. Within minutes of looking at my spine they tell me that either my fourth or fifth lumbar vertebra, down in the lower back just above the sacrum, is rotated backwards and upwards out of place. That’s what was causing the main pain. No surprise there. What did surprise me however was when my osteopath told me that it had probably been that way for about 8 months! How is it possible for my body to have a vertebra out of place for so long without me noticing? I was gobsmacked.

Back to my osteopathic treatment and they inform me that my abdominal cavity needed to be relaxed before they could realign my lower back vertebra. “Max” they say “your ab muscles are as solid as a boulder right now and are restricting all movements in the surrounding area. Your vertebrae can’t move properly without those abdominal muscles softening. If I try to move the spine now you will be in more pain.”

So, for 30 minutes, on my back on the massage table, my osteopath did various gentle manual osteopathy techniques on my abdominal and lower back muscles just to get them to switch off and relax. The techniques were almost imperceptible, like the gentlest massage I had ever had and sometimes just light finger-tip pressure over what I learned later were areas close to nerve plexuses. To my surprise he worked on my neck muscles, all the way up to the back of my head (the occipital muscles.) They told me to take three relaxed breaths while doing some gentle compressions on my abdominal cavity near my diaphragm and on the third breath I felt a tremor around my stomach region and more air went into my lungs than before. My body had got so used to having less lung capacity over the previous 8 months that this sudden expansion felt like a huge relief from some blockage.

Next, they had me turn onto my side with my top knee resting on the table and my bottom leg straight. They instructed me to inhale then exhale gently and to rotate my upper body while he gently pinned my upper knee down. I felt a mild relieving click, known as a cavitation in osteopathy, in my lower back and for the first time in over a week the excruciating pain was gone! Boom, one manual osteopathic treatment and my back pain dissolved. The relief was incredible. My whole body relaxed. “Et voila!” the osteopath said, with a smile. I was so happy and grateful.

Almost casually they then asked me, “Any other problems happening in your body at the moment?” I told them about suspecting arthritis was in my wrists, hands, ankles and feet and they very confidently dismissed this notion. “No. You don’t have to worry about arthritis Max. This problem is all from your rotated vertebra. It will be gone now. It all originated from the spine being misaligned by a tiny fraction.” And they were correct. After my back was realigned and popped back into place, the aches in my wrists, hands and feet were completely gone that same hour. I walked out of there on cloud nine.

Over the next few weeks my breathing got better, and my overall health improved. My back, wrist, hands, ankles and foot aches and pains never returned. I got sick much less frequently which was the state of health I had been used to before my fall. My HRV rose steadily. The strange, misaligned feeling in my body felt much better. Not perfectly aligned of course, because let’s face it we all have years of conditioned imbalances of one sort or another in the body. These are not correctible by any miracle overnight cures. But I felt much more like my usual healthy self.

I like to have an osteo-top-up treatment occasionally, even if I don’t have any issues to be resolved, just to stretch out and make space in my body, so I had one further osteopathy session about a year after the one that sorted my back pain out. This treatment was with a different therapist, and they used cranial-sacral osteopathy on my pelvis area which relaxed and decompressed my vertebrae, as they said this was still slightly jarred and compressed from the fall impact. After that treatment my breathing improved even more. It felt like my full lung capacity had returned.

What does all of this have to do with breathing, or what is the connection, you may be asking? Well, here is what I learned about breathing from my back injury experience. It’s not that Osteopathy is some miraculous physical therapy that can cure all ailments, although at times it seems that way to me. The huge lesson it taught me is of the importance of being able to breathe well, keeping our circulatory system healthy and how if just one system in one region of the body goes out of alignment it can negatively impact all the body’s systems and our health equilibrium. From just one slightly misaligned lower vertebra there was a huge knock-on effect on the rest of my body, starting with my breathing:

1. The instability around the abdominal-pelvic area of my trunk caused my abdominal and lower back muscles to compensate, becoming rigid and hyper-toned, compressing my organs and restricting my diaphragm during breathing. This is because it was squeezing the trunk to protect the unstable, injured area to keep everything in place to reduce further harm. There is a saying in osteopathy that the body hugs an injury.

• My restricted diaphragm meant that my oxygen intake was reduced, and therefore circulation of oxygenated blood to the rest of the body was impaired for a significant number of months. This meant less oxygen for all my body’s systems, such as the organs, blood cells, muscles, bones and so on. Less oxygenated blood reduces the effectiveness of all body systems that rely on it. Hence my cardiovascular and exercise fitness getting worse and worse.

• With reduced circulatory health comes a compromised immune system. Less oxygenated blood getting around my body means less venal return which is the body’s process of sending de-oxygenated blood and toxins back to the heart and lungs to be disposed of and recycled. My lymph drainage system, which hitches a lift from the blood circulation system to move around the body, was therefore not working at full efficiency. I then start to catch more colds, flu, bugs and whatnot.

• With my spine being misaligned and my muscles and other connective tissues being tense and compressing various structures in my body, I get referral pains in my wrists, hands, ankles and feet from pinched nerves. Misalignment is often accompanied by inflammation and swollen tissues which can squeeze nerves. The spinal misalignment also travels up to my neck which tenses up the muscles there, causing neck pain and more headaches – headaches caused by the neck are known as cervicogenic headaches. And all this time I’m walking around just living with more lower back aches than usual.

• So, to recap, I was doing less exercise, having more aches and pains, more incidence of illness, more headaches, reduced mobility, and feeling generally more negative and downcast. That’s my circulatory system, musculoskeletal system, immune and lymphatic systems, central nervous system, limbic and endocrine systems, and my digestive system all negatively impacted by a fall which knocked my back out of alignment and reduced my breathing capacity. And I’m sure my skin (integumentary system) and my urinary and reproductive systems didn’t feel optimal during that year either – they just seemed sub-par as they say. Phew! That is a heck of a lot of collateral damage originating from just one of the body’s systems being off kilter. Talk about the domino effect. Take a breath Max!

The takeaways from my experiences above, if I may pass on some wisdom, would be to take stock of your breathing. Especially if you have been experiencing a reduction in health of any kind. There might be a simple reason and fix. There could well be many alternative causes. But what I recommend is that you book in with your favourite physical therapist, whether they are an osteopath, yoga therapist, chiropractor, physiotherapist, bodywork therapist, Rolfer, personal trainer or massage therapist, and work with them to check in with your body, particularly the breathing.

Ask them to assess your body alignment, mobility and flexibility, muscle tension, organ motility (how well the organs move), diaphragm movement, moods, any unusual referral pains, aches or tenderness in your body that might have developed seemingly without an identifiable cause.

Ask yourself whether there was an accident or injury that you brushed off years ago. Some of us are great body armourers and we become experts at numbing ourselves via one method or another. We simply can crack on with everyday life, ignoring issues or completely unconscious of problems developing in our bodies. Others are hypersensitive and prefer to avoid checking in with their body or having physical therapy of any kind because it’s just too irritating and triggering to be jumbled around on a massage table. However, there are all kinds of therapies to suit all types of bodies.

Do your research and find the right modality that suits you best. I mainly book in for Osteopathy as I find it the most gentle and effective for my body type, but from my experience above I can wholeheartedly recommend checking in with your breathing in whichever way works for you and roll with it from there. You can do yourself the world of good just by breathing better. 

Written by Max Edwards, Manual Osteopathic Practitioner & Therapeutic Bodywork @ Ithaca Wellness www.ithacawellness.ca  Serving neighbourhoods in Coquitlam, Port Moody, Tri-Cities, Anmore, Belcarra, Westwood Plateau, Burke Mountain and beyond

---

Max’s Locations

Monday – 10am to 8pm @ Mobile in-house/at-work service Tri-Cities and Greater Vancouver – Book here: https://ithaca.noterro.com

Tuesday – 2pm to 8pm @ Dovira Care Integrative Health Clinic, 3020 Lincoln Ave, 109, Coquitlam, BC, V3B 6B4 – Book here: https://dovira.janeapp.com

Saturday – 10am to 8pm @ Dovira Care Integrative Health Clinic, 3020 Lincoln Ave, 109, Coquitlam, BC, V3B 6B4 – Book here: https://dovira.janeapp.com

Sunday – 11am to 5pm @ Mobile in-house/at-work service Tri-Cities and Greater Vancouver – Book here: https://ithaca.noterro.com

If you have any questions about bookings or Manual Osteopathy & Therapeutic Bodywork please email Max at  ithacawellnesscanada@gmail.com or call  778-929-6143

We would like to respectfully acknowledge that Ithaca Wellness operates on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded shared territories of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), sq̓əc̓iy̓aɁɬ təməxʷ (Katzie), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Stó:lō (Sto:lo) First Nations. We give thanks to these nations who continue to live on and care for these lands and waters, and for their wisdom towards wildlife.