Ankle Adjustments Lead to Headache Relief?

I have a story I like to tell my patients. It’s a great explanation that shows how our bodies are truly intertwined and how sometimes our pain doesn’t actually originate from the areas where we’d intuitively think are causing the problem.

I had a patient come to see me for headache relief. We found areas that were fixated in her neck as well as the rest of her back. I proceeded to adjust these areas and her headaches would go away. She was ecstatic as she had been living with them for many years.

The problem though, after several weeks of treatment, is that we could only keep her headache-free for 3 or 4 days at a time. She would come back in with a headache and these fixations in her spine would all be back. So I began to think, “There’s something else going on here. There’s got to be something else causing these problems.”

On her next visit, I dug a little deeper into her past history asking her about any trauma she had experienced, even as a kid. She relayed to me a story of a bad ankle injury she suffered as youth. I checked her ankle and found that it had a very limited range of motion with several bones out of place causing fixations in her foot and ankle. I proceeded to correct these areas.

I then moved up to her knee as well as her hip where I found additional fixations which I corrected and she experienced headache relief for 10 days. Our longest success period yet.

After one more adjustment of all these areas, her headaches were gone for good and she remains headache-free today. So, as you can see, the ankle bone really is connected to the leg bone. And the leg bone is connected to the hip bone. You know the rest.