Interview with Alberto Gonzalez, a Gonstead Technique Chiropractor
I ran the London Marathon this
year. It was a marvellous experience and the preparation was very much a
learning experience because it, not only, involved some hard training but also
treatment from a chiropractor which was a completely new experience for me.
I visited Alberto Gonzalez of the
Gonstead Clinic in London and learnt a lot about myself but also some of the
aspects of chiropractic and I loved it. Alberto has been kind enough to answer
some of my very basic questions below.
You treated my knees by working on my spine. This may seem strange to
some so can you say simply why this works?
This is a simple question to
answer if you understand the way the body works. The main organ controlling all
your body tissues is the Nervous System; brain, spinal cord and nerves all over
your body. The brain is the computer and the nerves are the wires that link it
with your muscles, tendons, joints and organs so it is very important that all
signals traveling between your body and brain flow correctly.
In your case, you had a nerve
impingement at the bottom of your spine that compromised the nerve flow between
your knee and the brain so your muscles in the knee were weak and that gave you
pain. All I did was identify that misalignment and corrected it using a spinal
adjustment and helped the recovery by giving you a couple of simple exercises.
Do you treat many injuries brought about by sporting activities – what
seems most common at the moment?
Yes I do. Together with posture
and ergonomic problems, sport injuries are very common. The most typical
situation is injuries brought by inadequate training in the gym, jogging or
poor technique while practicing Yoga and Pilates. The reality is that these complaints
are chronic but “flare up” when the person tries to do too much in training. In
these cases we always find the true cause of the problem and correct it so that
the patients can go back to practicing their favourite sport safely.
What are the most common other reasons that people seek your help –
such as lifestyle, stress etc?
Nowadays we have a very demanding
lifestyle that generally involves many hours sitting – car, office or train –
combined with high stress levels.
Sitting for a long time with poor
ergonomics together with lack of exercise or inadequate exercise, create what
we call “repetitive microtrauma” in the joints in the spine. This basically
means that repeating the same action in a poor mechanical way will create a negative
impact in your spine and injure it. At present, this is being diagnosed as
Repetitive Strain Injuries and it is becoming more and more typical.
In addition, as I said before,
the nervous system is the main organ in our body and stress affects its normal
function. You have to remember that stress is simply a “fight or flight”
response that should only be triggered in certain occasions of true danger to
our lives. However, at the moment this “fight or flight” reaction is being
triggered constantly creating true compromise to the way the nervous system
works giving us many typical discomforts like headaches, muscular tightness
around the low back or neck, poor sleeping, poor digestion, etc…
After chiropractic adjustment my knees felt better but I also felt
happy, confident and had more energy. This seems almost too good to be true but
did this surprise you?
Not really! This sensation of
“feeling good” is very common in our office. There are two reasons for this
reaction. The first one is that your nerves are working better and feeding more
positive information into the brain and this makes the brain produce less
adrenaline (stress hormone) and that feels good. Second, is the fact that you
did not use any health-destroying drugs in your treatment. These combined with
the fact that you can start to carry a more normal life has a positive impact
in your mood.
With this in mind could chiropractors treat illnesses thought usually
to be less ‘physical’ such as depression?
There is not enough research in
this area so we can’t claim that Chiropractic can treat all types of depression
and mood conditions. However, we know that we can help people feel better not
just physically but emotionally. Because we can make the nervous system work
better and also help many pains that affect us emotionally, there is a lot of
improvement that we can offer but more research is needed. It depends a lot on
the individual and new studies are coming that show positive results in the
management of such conditions.
After treatment I managed to complete a standard run of mine in a
quicker time after no additional training. Was I lucky or could you have helped
me do this?
It was not all luck! During your
treatment and training we focused on enhancing your performance and we did it
well. On one hand you did what you were told to do and on the other hand my job
was to make sure that your spine was free of any misalignment that created
nerve impingement. It can be said that before you were treated, you were
between 60% and 70% of your health potential because of those impingements in
your spine and after removing them and prescribing the right and simple
exercises, you moved towards 100% of health potential and in those
circumstances your performance increased significantly.
You specialise in the Gonstead Technique of chiropractic. Can you
briefly say what that is?
The Gonstead Technique is one of
the oldest techniques of Chiropractic and one of the most difficult to master
for the practitioner. It was developed in the ´50s by Dr. Clarence S. Gonstead
in Winsconsin, USA. He achieved great results with many patients and had the
biggest Chiropractic clinic in the world (and that record still stands) and
soon started to teach his technique to many Chiropractors. What makes this technique
special is the way we examine the spine and the way we treat it.
The Gonstead spinal analysis is
unique and aims at finding the level in your spine that is impinging the
nerves. This includes a very advanced “weight bearing X-Ray assessment” throughout
which we take specific measurements that help us understand where the problem
is, how to fix it and how long it will take. The treatment consists of very
specific spinal adjustments that also are unique to this technique and, as you
have been able to check, are very safe, very comfortable and very effective.
This is why it is a difficult technique to master and the reason why it is
difficult to find 100% Gonstead specialists.
After my experience of being
treated by Alberto I would definitely recommend him to others. He can be
contacted via:
Gonstead Clnics UK, 22 Harley
Street
Tel 020 76372920
www.gonstead.co.uk
