Back to the Beginning
The original founder of NVT was a Mechanical Engineer – but an Engineer with a chronic shoulder problem. He put up with it for years, and eventually sought medical help. Alongside this, he was also seeing other healthcare professionals like physios and chiropractors in the hope of finding a resolution to his pain.
After many months of physio at the local hospital, their frustration at his distinct lack of progress was obvious. They suggested the pain might be “in his head”, and not actually physical and offered the services of a psychologist. This was politely refused, and he was offered 2 options – pain killing injections, or an exploratory surgery.
This involved basically “cutting him open to see what they could find”. With his Engineering mind, he assumed the pain was his body simply telling him something was not right, so masking it with injections did not seem right. It may provide temporary relief, but would not address why the pain was there.
Root Cause
Remember, as an Engineer, he was taught to look at a problem, make AN ACCURATE ASSESSMENT OF THE ROOT CAUSE of the issue and address it accordingly.
Exploratory surgery did not appeal, as it could make things worse. Medically, that was the end of his journey, but it taught him a valuable lesson that would later become an important factor in the development of NVT. No one therapeutic intervention has all the answers. Modern medicine can do some amazing things, but as an Engineer he realised it has 2 main failings.
Firstly, it often treats the symptom, not the root cause. Secondly, diagnostically it can be quite limited – you can only work with what you can see. Results of scans, x rays bloods etc. If they prove inconclusive, how can you formulate an accurate, EVIDENCE BASED treatment programme if you don’t find anything wrong? Truth is you can’t. It becomes guess work, based on the skills of the individual clinician and their interpretation of your symptoms.
Life-Changing Moment
He was advised by a relative to go and see this guy who had successfully helped them. Having exhausted all other avenues he had nothing to lose. So there he was lying, fully clothed on this inflatable air bed, and the therapist was placing very light hands on various parts of his body. No manipulation, no pulling or jerking muscles or bones. After a short while, the therapist asked him “what have you done to your ribs?” He had broken 3 ribs 10 years previously. They had healed and he had no pain there so it was never even mentioned on the consultation form.
It was one of those magical “lightbulb” moments. Some sub conscious part of him went YES! Someone is finally listening!! In short, his ribs still had unresolved trauma from the injury. Scar tissue prevented his rib cage from fully expanding – this dragged his spinal column over slightly to one side, shortening the spinal cord and compromising nerve signals in his neck. Result was signals never got through to regenerate his right shoulder muscles. This was a life changing moment. He was almost pain free within weeks. After being told he had to learn to live with his pain, this was incredible. The ribs were the ROOT CAUSE, and the shoulder the associated symptom! Nobody else had ever looked at anything other than his shoulder before.
New Journey
He went back to see this guy 2 months later. He didn’t need to – he felt amazing! He was back training and pretty much pain free. But as an Engineer, he needed to know how the therapist had successfully diagnosed his ROOT CAUSE using only his hands when all the amazing tools available to modern medicine could not.
The therapist that helped our founder, Peter Tregloan, has sadly passed now. Peter not only enabled his body to repair itself, but he awakened in him the possibility that he too could do this work.
Our founder initially started working with Peter, before following his own path and earning the nickname “The Body Engineer”.
To read our founders full story, click on the link to directly access his autobiography.
