Ten years of back pain, and a wisdom-tooth extraction that stood out in her history.
A woman in her late 20s came to see me with more than a decade of chronic back pain. She’d seen numerous chiropractors and medical doctors, had X-rays taken, and had been diagnosed with mild disc-space narrowing at L5-S1 — without anything that actually changed how she felt. Sitting was consistently the worst position, and she was stiff every morning.
Her history traced the pain back to her freshman year of college, when she started playing volleyball. There was no specific injury she could point to. Looking through the rest of her history, one thing stood out: she’d had her wisdom teeth removed less than a year before the back pain began.
What I found
On examination, her muscles were broadly hypertonic — too tight, as though her nervous system was protecting her spine by locking everything down. Wisdom-tooth extraction can sometimes leave the bones of the skull jammed or restricted from the procedure itself, and that was what I found in her case.
What I did
I adjusted the cranial bones I found restricted. Her muscles normalized immediately, but returned to being overly tight by the following week — twice. That told me I needed a more thorough approach: her cranial bones were unusually stuck, with what felt like scar tissue involved, so I used a more specific and more involved cranial technique that I don’t start with by default.
What changed
After that adjustment, her muscles stayed normalized at the following visit, and her back pain was gone. We spent a few more visits addressing some remaining weaknesses in her hip flexors and deep lower-back muscles. Three months later, she continues to do well.
My clinical model is that the meninges — the membrane surrounding the brain and spinal cord — connect the cranium to the rest of the spine, so a restriction at the top can be associated with tension and protective muscle guarding much further down. That’s a clinical model based on my experience, not an established mechanism. What this case illustrates is that some cases need more than one round of adjusting before the underlying restriction is actually resolved, and that’s part of why I reassess rather than assume.
Related reading
Read about how I assess the cranium, or see more real patient cases.