| Magazine
article in 'Pathways to Health' -
July 1999 - SA
|
|
|
Fear of becoming totally paralysed while
still in his 30s led Ewald Meggersee, together with his wife Gail, to
pioneer the body-wellness system known as body stress release (BSR).
"I had the distorted posture of a 120 year-old and would frequently
wake up paralysed from the waist down," says Ewald. "And all my
life - from the age of five when I fell out of a tree and lay unconscious
for a week - no one had been able to find the source of the continuous
shooting pains and cramping I suffered in my lower back and legs."
His school days were a nightmare; he couldn't sit still at a desk and was
shouted at for fidgeting. He would often collapse from a deep ache in his
knees if asked to stand for any period of time - so Cadets was always a
problem. Gym teachers 'forced him to touch his toes until he collapsed in
agony. When he was 15, he was told his pain and severe cramping were
psychosomatic, because no one could find any physical cause for it.
|
| Ewald
qualified as an industrial chemist, and met and married Gail, a teacher.
His body pain didn't let up. "Sometimes," says Gail, "Ewald
would scream out in his sleep and leap out of bed in the grip of intense
cramping in his calf muscles. Our blackest moment came the day he woke up
feeling no sensation from the waist down. I watched in horror as he rolled
out of bed onto the floor, pulling himself up via the wardrobe for support
while he waited for sensation to return to his legs."
|
|
|
The nightmare became a regular occurrence for Ewald. "You can imagine
my fear of going to sleep at night when 1 didn't know if I was going to
wake up permanently paralysed," he says. "Eventually it got so
bad that I faced losing my job and spending the rest of my life in a
wheelchair. We felt we had nothing to lose, so we decided to pack up
everything and both train as chiropractors in America."
|
|
Over the years, Ewald had received temporary relief from regular
chiropractic treatments, but the pain would always return. Now they hoped
to discover something which perhaps others had missed and find a way to
identify the source of Ewald's pain and reverse his worsening condition.
|
|
"During our studies in America we had the good fortune to meet Dr
Richard van Rumpt, a retired chiropractor who had researched an approach
completely different to chiropractic manipulation," says Ewald.
"He talked about listening to the body and using it as a biofeedback
mechanism that would be self-healing. When we returned to South Africa, we
built on his method of reading the body's feedback response to areas of
muscle stress and contraction. The technique became known as body stress
release."
"What we discovered is that the body protects itself from stress in a
highly organised way. Although it can normally adapt to the various
stresses and strains of everyday life - falls, jerks, heavy lifting, bad
posture - if the stress gets too severe, the body suffers overload and
locks the stress into itself in lines of tension and contraction. This
tension - or body stress - leads to pain, numbness or stiffness. it also
interferes with the body's self-healing defense mechanism. The body is
less and less able to cope with or adapt to added stress, and begins to
deteriorate further. This is why a person with long-term body stress may
also feel tense, tired, and lacking in energy and enthusiasm for life.
Headaches, backache and indigestion may follow."
In some cases, a person suffering stress overload no longer feels stiff or
sore - but just comes to accept as normal a sense of having less than 100%
well-being. Thousands of South Africans beat a path to the Meggersee's
door as word spread when they started their BSR practice in Cape Town in
the 1980s. Many of their clients, like Ewald himself, had tried other
traditional avenues of medical and chiropractic treatment - without
success. But now the couple had found a gentle, almost miraculous way of
enhancing the body's own healing powers by releasing long-held stress
locked in the muscle system.
They knew it worked because their prime guinea pig, Ewald himself, had
gone from being a near cripple to regaining his strength and the pain-free
body he now describes as being as fit as a teenager's. Today, at 54, Ewald
reports that his body continues to improve. 'For the first time in my life
I can feel the sensation of socks and shoes on my feet and have improved
movement in my ankles,' he says. Ironically, the BSR system which the
Meggersees pioneered differs radically from its chiropractic roots. Ewald
says that most of their students come from fields unrelated to
medicine
- alternative or traditional. "BSR differs from chiropractic in that it uses information provided by the body itself to determine where abnormal muscle tension is under-mining the efficiency of the nervous system and disturbing its ability to co-ordinate its functioning."
|
|
|
|
T
H E M
A G A Z I
N E R
A C K
CLICK
on a cover to
view article
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
