 |
A 65 year old man presented in my office with a leg problem that had begun a month before with a sprain of his knee while walking on a beach in Bali. Apparently a wave had thrown him off-balance while his foot was anchored in the wet sand. At first the pain was localized to his knee. There was some swelling but it was not severe enough for him to seek medical attention or to delay his long flight home to Canada. After a few days at home the pain was persisting. It was also moving below his knee and was accompanied by diffuse swelling of the calf extending down to his ankle. A visit to the Emergency Room ensued and because of his many hours of air travel, the attending physician (understandably) suspected a deep vein thrombosis. However x‐rays and ultrasound imaging revealed no circulatory problem. A week later, the patient was no better. He returned to the Emergency Department; a repeat ultrasound was performed and because of swelling behind the knee, a MRI was performed. The MRI revealed a small Baker's cyst and a "soleus tear". Neither explained the swelling and pain below the knee, which was by this time becoming more prominent in the ankle. By the time I saw him, the swelling in the mid-calf was subsiding. In fact the swelling seemed to center more on the lower leg and ankle. (This was despite the fact that he had not strained his ankle with the injury.) A little farther down the extremity, I noticed a small violaceous cutaneous cyst over the dorsum of the distal second metatarsus. The patient explained that the cyst was a re-growth of a previously surgically-removed cyst. It was not tender, but autonomic response testing (See Chapter 4 of my book) indicated that it was an interference field! The cyst was treated energetically with a Tenscam device. (Neural therapy with procaine would certainly have achieved the same result, which was abolition of the interference field.) However autonomic response testing showed blocked regulation, which meant that the autonomic nervous system was still not responding fully. There are many possible causes of blocked regulation, but in an otherwise healthy man, high on the list would be another interference field. My eyes were drawn to the slightly swollen ankle. My hands could feel "arcing", a 60 cpm pulsation emanating from the ankle and the ankle had a passive range of motion consistent with somatic dysfunction. The patient also revealed that he had a history of recurring ankle sprains on that side. There were three options for treating the ankle: (1) an energetic Tenscam treatment, (2) quaddles of dilute local anaesthetic into the skin overlying the swelling, or (3) osteopathic "unwinding" of the ankle. I chose the last option, because I like to feel the "release" of the tissues under my hands ‐ a sure sign of successful treatment. Autonomic response testing confirmed this, as "open regulation" was restored. And by the next day, the patient's pain and swelling was well on their way to recovery. A few days later all pain and swelling were gone. This case was interesting because an acute injury (to the knee) had the effect of bringing two latent interference fields in the lower leg to the surface. One was a classic (neural therapist's) scar. The other was a latent ankle sprain. In fact as time went by the effects of the initial injury to the knee subsided and "expression" of the interference fields came to the fore. In other words, the knee injury had acted as a "Second blow" (Speransky) in reawakening the dynamic processes initiated by Speransky's "irritations of the nervous system". See newsletter Vol. 7, No.1. Sincerely, Robert F. Kidd, MD, CM |