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Home / Thoughts / A picture is worth a thousand words

A picture is worth a thousand words

Written by Sean on Wednesday, March 15, 2006

And a model is worth much more. It’s funny, I’ve been "studying" the spine and spinal cord for decades. Well, not assiduously, I’ve looked into it because I’m obviously interested in the topic, and informed myself along the lines. I’ve seen charts and graphics and pictures of both the spine and spinal cord. I’d been much more interested in what happened to the body with injuries at certain levels of the spinal cord. Last week, I saw an actual model of the spine and where the spinal cord lives in it. Funnily enough, despite all the photos and graphics I’d seen before, seeing it in 3-D gave me a different understanding.

I was at the osteopath, getting worked on, when I asked the guy "Where’s L1, and how could a chiropractor do real damage to the spinal cord there?". Of course, he was curious and wanted to know why I asked. I told him that I’d been telling an acquaintance online about starting to see an osteopath and he told me to be careful of "quacks", that he’d been left paralysed in the right foot after visiting a chiropractor. He seemed to believe it. In any case, he didn’t argue with the story.

So, he poked me where L1 would be (where I thought it would!). Then explained that unless there was a pre-existing condition, there really wouldn’t be a chance for someone to cause that kind of damage just through manipulation. He explained that maybe the bone had been split a little bit and broken, or there was a disk bulging to start with, that kind of thing.

As I was getting dressed and ready to go, he showed me the model he has of the spine and explained a little bit more. It was really cool to see it other than on a flat picture.

I learned something that day. Something I already knew, but seeing it that way sealed the lesson, in a way. Neat, one never ceases to learn.

Which, in the end, doesn’t bring me any closer to my goal…