In February 2001, I was playing in an adult ice hockey game and things were not going well. I was sitting on the bench, hunched over, and my lower back and neck were killing me. I didn’t know what to do. I knew about chiropractics (my grandfather had been a chiropractor), and I had been a patient of a local chiropractor for a few years, but I wasn’t getting any better. In fact, things were getting worse. Only a few weeks before the chiropractor I was seeing had taken a new set of x-rays of my back. He told me I had adult isthmic spondylolisthesis, which means that a vertebra in my lower back was cracked and had slipped forward over the vertebra in front of it.
I was a little overwhelmed by the news. Did this mean my back was only going to get worse over the years? How was I going to deal with the pain? Was I going to have to give up sports? Would I end up in a wheel chair? I wasn’t sure what to do, and my chiropractor at the time wasn’t offering me much help. Because of the nature of the injury, my chiropractor wasn’t even willing to adjust my lower back for fear of further aggravating the problem.
But while I was sitting there on the bench that night in February, a player sitting next to me asked what was wrong. I told him my back hurt, and I explained my problem to him. He told me he too had a “spondy.” He also said he was a chiropractor and that I should come down to his office and he would see what he could do.
The ice hockey player whom I talked to that night was Dr. Evan Berk. I’ve been a patient of Dr. Berk’s ever since—and the results have been amazing.
During my first visit, Dr. Berk looked over the x-rays my previous chiropractor had shot, and then he took a few more x-rays to get a better look at the spondy. He explained to me what a spondy was. He explained how he went about treating a spondy. And he also explained the other issues that were going on with my back and neck. The two things that surprised me about this first visit was the amount of time Dr. Berk spent talking to me as well as his willingness to answer all my questions in a way I could understand.
I started seeing the doctor twice a week. I also started going to a masseuse in order to loosen up my muscles so the adjustments would be more effective. After six months, I started to notice significant improvement in my back. There was much less pain and fewer muscle spasms. I remained committed to the treatment plan and after a year I was again playing ice hockey, skiing, lifting weights, and jogging relatively pain free.
Now, four years latter, my back feels remarkably “normal.” I can sleep through the night without waking up due to back pain. I can go for long walks without my back tightening up and pain running down my legs. My calves are no longer tight as steel due to the muscle spasms in my lower back. And, best of all, I now only see Dr. Berk once or twice per month for a “tune-up” adjustment.
It’s been a long road to recovery, and it took a lot of effort on my part as well as the doctor’s. But I can safely say that if I hadn’t met Dr. Berk that night at the ice hockey rink, I would probably, due to the pain, be a miserably unhappy human being right now . . . all because of a back problem that turned out to be totally manageable.
Scott Benton
