Body & Soul with Gail Harris

Waking Up the Brain: Amazing Adjustments
A Life in Equilibrium
Sometimes, the patient isn't the only one affected by the treatment. Dr. Ted Carrick spoke with Body & Soul about his experience treating Lucinda Harman, and how it changed them both.
"Lucinda Harman is a marvelous human being. She's been a university professor, she's an experimental psychologist by trade. She's taught neurophysiology, neurobiology, and clinical neurology at the university level. And has been through just a heck of a life, with a lot of problems that have been very, very complex, that we were able to assist her with.
"We're certainly not treating her for the genetic expression of what she has [Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome], and neither is there anybody at this time that can do that. But we're treating her wholeness, specific to lesions in her brain, that allow us to have her functioning without her heart racing out of her chest, without her spinning out of control, without her eyes not being able to focus.
"I saw Lucinda in grand rounds. At the time I saw her she was completely disabled. She was unable to speak, to think, to work at a level that would be reasonable for a professor. She had feelings of dizziness, vertigo, sounds in her head and ears, and tachycardia, or a fast racing heart -- which really would go out of control. When this would happen, her legs would swell up almost like an elephant, her face would droop, her lids would close and she couldn't move one side of her face. She would have angulation and stiffness of body parts, similar to what you see with an individual having a stroke.
"I think Lucinda's one of the very fortunate ones because I saw her in grand rounds, and her changes were immediate, as a consequence of what we were able to do with her.
"In Lucinda's case, it was a little more difficult because she couldn't get up and do an exercise for instance -- she couldn't walk. So, we had to devise different mechanisms that would allow us to cause a brain-changing activity… In her case, we would use warm air stimulation for instance, in her ear, and hook her up to the ECG monitor and we would see an abrupt change in the rate of her heart. We would see her legs shrink in front of us.
"I think with all the miracles and the mysteries of the human nervous system, nothing surprises me anymore, and if it was Lucinda's case by itself, I would definitely be in awe. But there's more then one Lucinda -- there are many patients like this that I've attended to, many thousands of them and there are many thousands more that are treated by my colleagues. So, she's not an isolated case, although she's an individual case.
"The things that seem to be miracles are things that you only see once or twice. When you start seeing them every day of your clinical life, they're not that miraculous, but you realize how very fragile we are. Someone can play in the Super Bowl and get slam dunked and get up and go to Disney World, and somebody else can step off a curb and never be the same. We're very strong, yet we're very, very fragile. The things that chiropractic specialists are doing, although they seem simple, are very, very complex. If we do them on the wrong side, if we do them with the wrong temperature, or misapply them in some way, we can make the people worse.
"I think Lucinda will be doing some great things. Even though she has a PhD in these studies, because of her disorder she has learned just a hundred-fold more about the nervous system. And I believe that this is one woman who will be able to share with other people what she has learned as a consequence of her own unfortunate scenario.
"Lucinda's wonderful. I don't think any of us know how we would deal with that type of situation. She certainly has been dealt a bad deck of cards, but she's playing a winning hand -- I think she's inspirational to other people."
Program Description
A Balancing Act
Ted Carrick
A Life in Equilibrium
Tell Me More
Help YourSelf

Body & Soul is currently airing Monday-Friday at 7:00pm and 8:30pm on PBS YOU.
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