been involved in a car accident.
The mother had never experienced any neck problems in the past, but the daughter reported
that she’d had neck stiffness for years. After X-raying both, I found that the eighty-year-old
mother showed no degeneration of her joints: they were smooth, her discs were well-rounded
and situated perfectly between the vertebrae and her spine was in correct alignment.
However, her forty-year-old daughter’s discs showed significant deterioration: they had
changed shape and become narrow. Her joints were rough and arthritic and my analysis of her X-ray indicated that degeneration had begun in her twenties.
Upon questioning her, I discovered that the daughter had been involved in two previous car accidents, one fifteen years before and another eight years ago.
In all three accident cases, her car was rear-ended by another while she was stopped at a red
light. Our interview also revealed that the daughter worked long hours doing computer-related
work that she found quite stressful and that she engaged in no regular exercise program.
The multiple injuries combined with a sedentary lifestyle had caused her neck and shoulder
muscles to become tense and shortened. Those constantly contracted muscles in turn, created a loss of joint movement in her neck that led to premature degeneration of her cervical discs.
The mother, on the other hand, had been lucky enough to have never been in a car accident
until the one that brought her into my clinic. During most of her life she’d been a stay-at-home
mom whose work looking after three children involved duties that kept her naturally active and
mobile.
The physical demands of tending to domestic work, combined with her accident-free
history had kept her muscles and joints in shape and her discs free of measurable degeneration.
