From inews.co.uk
After years of debilitating pain, it was a complementary therapy that gave Camilla Fellas Arnold "miraculous" results
It was as she got to the altar that Camilla Fellas Arnold had a moment of sudden lucidity. It was her wedding day. She was wearing a big dress; weighed down by layers of fabric, a hoop skirt, and a long train; and she had just walked the length of the third biggest parish church in the UK.
Months earlier, such a feat would have been impossible, so severe was the back pain she had lived with for almost a decade. “I stood there and I just had this moment of clarity,” she says, seemingly still astounded. “I didn’t think I’d be able to get there without being in pain.”
Fellas Arnold, 34, had a rear-end car crash in July 2008, aged 17, just months after passing her driving test, resulting in severe whiplash. It was only on the day after the accident that she realised something was really wrong. “I felt like there was pressure on my throat, almost like I was being suffocated,” she says. But it was the back pain that followed her injury that, she says, was excruciating. “It was a lower back pain for the most part but then, sometimes, it went across the middle of my back and felt like an elastic band being stretched really, really hard.”
The pain also went up to her shoulders and felt like someone was pinching her. Her back, she explains, had become hypersensitive and she experienced acute pain every time something touched it. On occasion, she couldn’t breathe. “It felt like daggers, sometimes, jabbing into me.”
Fellas Arnold also developed other conditions because of the way she was holding herself to counter the back pain. “I was walking a bit hunched over,” she says. “It started to trigger sciatica on my left side and that was just horrendous because it would go all the way down to my ankle.”
Still just a teenager, Fellas Arnold felt as though she had become elderly overnight. The pain was impacting every aspect of her existence. She couldn’t even brush her hair without experiencing intense discomfort. “Everything had to be adjusted,” she says, adding that she started to accept that that was the way her life was going to be: agony. It even began to affect her relationships. “I felt like I just wanted to rip everyone’s head off. I know that sounds horrible but I was just like: ‘Don’t talk to me, don’t look at me. I’m in so much pain, just leave me.’”
But she wasn’t alone. About 800 million people worldwide have lower back pain and 70 per cent who recover experience flare-ups within a year. New research has shown that walking three times a week to ease back pain almost halves the risk of its recurrence. According to soft tissue therapist Vic Paterson, back pain is poorly understood and has many different causes, some physical, some psychological, some sociological. “What to try depends on the cause,” she says.
Fellas Arnold tried everything. First, doctors sent her to physiotherapy. “They’d given me some exercises which didn’t really do anything.” She also tried yoga but to no avail. “I’d been into yoga before,” she says. “But my flexibility had gone and holding poses I’d never had problems with before was beyond painful. I was trying to help myself but it really wasn’t doing anything.”
At one point, her mum suggested osteopathy, which the NHS describes as “a way of detecting, treating and preventing health problems by moving, stretching and massaging a person’s muscles and joints”. “I found it really painful,” says Fellas Arnold. “I’d be gripping the side of the bed.” Expensive osteopathy appointments provided momentary relief only. “Maybe for a few days I felt a bit better but it would start to creep up again.”
But it was when she got engaged in 2014 that Fellas Arnold started to really panic. Three years earlier, she attended a standing-only concert and, just 20 minutes into the first set, had to breathe through the pain emanating from her back. How was she going to walk down the aisle, let alone stand for a 45-minute church ceremony?
In the end, it was an innocuous advert for the Bowen Technique in Fellas Arnold’s village newspaper that changed her life. She’d never heard of it before but, months before her wedding day and after nearly a decade of chronic pain, she was willing to try anything.
The Bowen Technique originated in Australia in the 1950s, developed by Thomas A Bowen. Bowen, who had no medical training, claimed his technique was “a gift from God”. The technique arrived in the UK in the 1990s and its practitioners claim it will cure anything from asthma to anxiety. An unregulated treatment, it isn’t available on the NHS, although some trusts do suggest it as a complementary treatment. It is also on the register of the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC), the body that regulates complementary healthcare practitioners in the UK. The register means it has been approved by the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care.
The Bowen Technique comprises a series of gentle but precise moves over muscle and connective tissue and is designed to assist the body in re-balancing and resetting itself in order to facilitate natural healing. Fellas Arnold’s therapist performed these moves across her body before leaving the room. She’d then return and do more before leaving again. This went on for around an hour.
According to Helen Mary Perkins, a Bowen therapist and instructor and Chair of Bowen Training UK, Bowen’s Technique is different from other options because of how gentle it is. “It’s a passive therapy inducing relaxation and change through its unique pause phases, enabling the body to register through the nervous system as well,” she says. “It is increasingly recognised as a complementary therapy which gets results not only for a variety of physical ailments but also in terms of mental and emotional health.”
After Fellas Arnold’s first session, the difference was remarkable. “I got off the bed without having to think about it; without having to gently or slowly push myself up or think about how I was placing my hands to support myself,” she says. “It was miraculous.”
Fellas Arnold had five sessions across five weeks and, within two or three sessions, says she was pain free for the majority of her day. “By the end of the five sessions, I had no pain.” She was disbelieving. Her Bowen therapist advised her to return for maintenance sessions should the pain appear again. It never did.
Life without pain took on a different hue. “It was almost like I didn’t know who I was without the pain because I’d had it for so long,” she says. “My relationships with people improved, my concentration improved, my ability to sit and do work and get on with my life improved.”
And so it was that, months later, Fellas Arnold was standing at the altar with her new husband, experiencing her moment of clarity. “My life had been constant, chronic pain,” she says. “My immediate family knew about it but I didn’t tell everyone else…it was nice not to have to hide anything or put a mask on.”
She still feels back pain on occasion. “When we were redecorating the house, after that kind of day, I can feel it in my back. But you’d expect that after a day where you’ve been redecorating the house!” Crucially, unlike before, the pain dissipates. “That pain doesn’t live there anymore,” she says. “It’s not who I am."
https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/how-cured-back-pain-without-surgery-3132511
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