Treatment - Day 2

In direct opposition of Clubber Lang, my dad's expectations for the day: "Less pain". With that, my dad ambled into Dr. DeMartino's office. He received the same treatment as on day two, starting with the foot bath, followed by the light therapy and then the chiropractic work.

"The set up of the light floods the body with extra energy so that what we do will take," Dr. DeMartino said, explaining the light therapy that I still have lots of questions about.

He checked my dad's hips and feet and was pleased with the movement. He then applied pressure to the atlas and skull bone. Holding the pressure right there, he explained there's a lot more to this joint then medicine has been giving credit for. At some point in the near future he will add electric current to the therapy.

"I'm a big fan of adding pieces as we go," he said. "Instead of adding things all together and then you can't tell what does what."

The bloodwork is an important tool, he said, but the body will yield even more information. The detox will start soon, too. After that he will do a urinalysis. This interests me greatly as we have specific scientific results from similar tests done on my dad ten years ago when he was seen by Dr. Len Saputo, a doctor in the Bay Area who uses some of the same modalities as Dr. DeMartino.

We talked about balance, as my dad feels off balance. He talked about counter-receptors and eyes/vision in addition to what's going on in the inner ear. He spoke of proprioception, which is, in layman's terms your brain's ability to sense your body's position throughout space. This interested me, on another tangent, because Peyton Manning had just been discussing this with David Letterman. 



Dr. DeMartino also brought up the interesting case of Ozzy Osbourne. As Dr. D. is, in his own words,  a big fan of Black Sabbath, he went to see their reunion tour a few years back. This was while the Osbourne's reality show was on television. In case you don't know, Ozzy came off as a blithering idiot for the most part, rambling incoherently in place of speech. When Dr. D went to see Black Sabbath he was curious to see what was left of the bat-head biting Ozzy of old. It turned out quite a bit was left. While singing, Ozzy was perfect -- as if transported back to the early 1980's . When he would speak, in between songs, he was…the blithering idiot. So what does this say about how are brains work? Quite a bit, actually. For one, we don't understand the inordinate number of pathways, nerve endings or transmissions up there nearly as much as we'd like to. The way we understand things, in fact, may be completely wrong. This happens more frequently than we often acknowledge (see: "debunk this").