Finally Someone Saw It

Our older son's legs have turned in for a long time. Actually, let me correct that. Since he regressed his left leg slowly began to turn inward. His right leg was fine. He can now turn his left foot completely towards the back with no trouble and no pain. Recently his right leg began an inward turn. I have asked countless doctors about it. I have talked to specialists. Everyone sees it, no one knows what it is. Muscle guys say bone, bone guys say muscle. One doctor blew us off completely and said, "it's just Autism". We were given expensive custom inserts, had muscles taped by therapists, and more. Sigh.

Finally our ortho doctor did thorough testing (the first one to do so) and found out, without a doubt, it's not bone related. He said it was muscular/neuromuscular. I went to the top neuromuscular doctors (supposedly) and she is the one who told us, "it's just Autism".

I had all but given up. He has pain related to this, he trips on his own foot, it makes him clumsy, and no one seemed to care enough to help.

I decided to throw in the towel after one last call for help. I emailed our DAN doctor about the issue. hoping he could refer me to someone. He didn't refer me. He told us to bring our son in to see him. We did.

He poked.

He mashed.

He bent.

He twisted.

He looked.

He felt.

He sighed and said there was nothing biomechanically wrong with our son (meaning nothing a chiropractor could help), there was nothing wrong with his bones (we had hear that from a pretty reliable source). He said this was organic and it was definitely in his muscles. It was all tied to his issues we knew about (mito, deficiencies, etc). This means we were some what helping with the protocol we were on, but not nearly enough to help because those items could never correct the damage. They could only support and heal the CAUSE.

Our son has loose muscles on one side of his body, very tight muscles on the other, and it's twisting and tilting his pelvis.

He decided to work with PNF (Propioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation). Normally he does this in-office but we live quite far from him so regular multiple visits each week would be impossible. Instead, he's teaching us the exercises, giving us a rigorous schedule, and will see us every 3 weeks to monitor our son's progress. He said words I never hear him say. He told me he thought we could reverse this. It won't be fast or easy. We have a lot of work ahead of us to help him stabilize, move things like they should be, and then make them symmetrical in usage. We are working a few hours a week to try and overcome what the body has been doing for years and will be doing 24/7 as we do the exercises.

I appreciate that we have a doctor who finally really looked at our child, saw his issues, and helped set up a plan to remedy the situation.

My take away? Never give up!