My Broken Body & How Western Medicine Failed Me Completely

health

Apr 2

Part I of the Broken Body Series

DISCLAIMER: This is a personal journey through chronic pain, bodywork, and alternative therapy. I am not a medical professional and this is not medical advice.

We are taught, pretty much from the moment that we start learning, that doctors are well-educated authorities on all things health-related.

Western medicine has clout. Lab coats invoke science, sterility, and intelligence. Latin-based terms feel like they tap into history and authenticity. And the machines? They're so high tech that they see through us and we barely understand how or why.

Sure, if you've got a broken bone or strep throat, they'll probably fix you right up. But what happens when the problem isn't simple? What if the problem involves so many aspects of who you are that specialists lose the forest for the trees?

The thing is, for all its intimidating complexity, Western medicine is actually pretty simple at its core. Pain? Take a painkiller. Infection? Antibiotics! Broken? Patch it up. But what about the things that caused the pain, the infection, or the break? To figure that out, I hate to say, but you might be on your own.

It's not that Western doctors don't care, it's just that they're... well, specialists. They each have their own area of expertise that rarely overlaps with other domains. So if your foot hurts, you see a foot doctor, not a neck doctor. But in some cases, a neck doctor might be the only one who can explain what’s going on with your foot.

If my body is a temple, it's one of the ruined ones you see in abandoned places, overgrown with ivy, half-collapsed, and clearly neglected. And for fifteen years, Western medicine did nothing more than hand me a metaphorical roll of duct tape and wish me well.

So today, I want to talk to you about my bones and my breath.

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What’s Wrong with Me

Back when I was a fresh-faced, early-20s Canadian metalhead Au Pair in Finland, I was hitting up a lot of concerts and traveling Europe in search of new friends.

In the summer of 2009, my host mom (from my second Au Pair family in Germany) set me up on a friend date with her cousin, who was my age and also happened to be a geeky metalhead. He showed me around Munich for an afternoon and our adventure wrapped up at a metal bar that night when we met up with an internet friend of mine, drank too much, and…

I kid you not, I headbanged so hard that I didn’t just give myself whiplash, I gave myself severe whiplash. I still remember the feeling of my vertebrae pulling apart like it was happening in slow motion and there was nothing I could do.

Yes, kids, what your mom was telling you about headbanging is true. It can absolutely ruin your life.

I have either “Only for the Weak” by In Flames or “Warriors of the World United” by Manowar to blame for this. Oh, and myself. Definitely myself. But also, what the fuck German healthcare? They gave me an x-ray to make sure nothing was broken and then after that, sent me on my way with no help or follow-up.

I was in severe pain for about a week and then things mellowed down into medium-high pain and stayed there.

This remains one of the best photos ever taken of me

Whiplash without Care

As salty as I am at the German doctor for doing literally nothing, I couldn’t tell you if any other country would have done better with my whiplash injury. I don’t really think Western doctors know what to do with these sorts of physical traumas and Western people, like myself, don’t know about the alternatives. So, like many people with whiplash, I just kept living in chronic pain, assuming that it was normal and a necessary—if a bit unfair—punishment for my life choices.

However, my physical capacity also dropped significantly. I started to have all sorts of problems that I couldn’t do anything about. The first metatarsal joint in the ball of my right foot, for example, began to hurt regularly and was worse on cold days when it might ache.

I lost all core stability too. I had a sports masseuse who literally could not find my deep core muscles. She was poking around my pelvis in full wtf mode, outright asking me, “How am I not even able to find these muscles?”

I even went to a physiotherapist once to see if she could help me with some strengthening exercises or stretches, and you know she must have been a loopy-ass hippy if me—a person who hasn’t bought a pair of non-harem pants in 8 years and who gathers herbs from my yard instead of medicine from the store—thought she was over-the-top. She ignored all of my requests for strengthening techniques and told me that I should “talk to my body more kindly.” Don’t get me wrong, I actually do believe that attitude makes a big difference, but when I’m in pain and I want it to go away? I really don’t think that my attitude is the (biggest) problem.

The CrossFit Years

Back at the peak of my suffering, a then-friend of mine—a personal trainer and newly licensed CrossFit coach—suggested I might feel better if I toned up a bit and offered that I try his new gym’s on-ramp class to see how it felt. I’ve always been strong for a female, so after that first class, seeing how feeble I had become when doing the basics (I could barely get up from my bus stop after the second class), I thought, “I really need this.”

Thus began my CrossFit career. I was a diligent athlete—three classes a week, gym friends, gyms shirts, and gym gear… oh yeah, I was into it. I had always thought CrossFit was little more than some modern made-up modality (it is, let’s not lie) that stupid bros do, go too hard, and hurt themselves. Maybe that’s still true in some places, but my coaches were all about technique and safety. I thrived… for about 2 years.

What Changed?

After a decade, I became pretty in tune with the full spectrum of skeletal and muscular pain, so it was obvious when the post-workout soreness shifted from good, muscle-developing pain to a more “Why do my bones hurt?” variety.

After about 2 years of CrossFit, it wasn’t a good burn anymore—I just hurt. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I was alarmed.

So I stopped doing CrossFit and instead became… a CrossFit coach. Yep. That’s right. You’d have to see it to believe it, eh? My then-friend wasn’t happy at our gym, so I joined his new gym’s team as a coach. When we opened CrossFit Red Arrow, I could train at my own pace, with no pressure to push past my limits.

And I actually loved coaching. I wasn’t a peak-performance athlete, but that made me more relatable. I could meet people where they were: new moms, folks with joint issues, people who were mentally struggling just to show up. I was great at scaling things and finding realistic starting points.

Was I an amazing personal trainer? Nah—if you wanted to be an athlete, you didn’t belong with me. I was the coach for people who weren’t naturally sporty.

However, for personal reasons, I got pretty fed up with what was going on at the gym and I left the company and later quit as a coach. And I think I gave up on regular exercise as well. I’ve gone water jogging now and then, but I’ve never kept up anything regular for more than a month or two. It seemed like no matter what I did, my pain just got worse, so after a while, I stopped doing anything.

Finally Getting Help

It wasn’t until one of my mom’s friends passed through Helsinki while on a cruise in 2019—a full decade after the accident—that I finally got some helpful advice. She told me about this newfangled form of chiropractic that focuses on the C1 vertebra and had apparently changed her life after she got whiplash in a car accident 3 years prior. The method was called NUCCA (National Upper Cervical Chiropractic Association), and it focused on realigning the spine from the top down.

It was so new that the closest practitioner I could find was in the UK (there was no one in Europe), and she gave off serious money-grubbing capitalist slimebag vibes, per our emails. So instead, I decided to go back to Canada and try it there.

That’s when I found Dr. Ryan Brown in Calgary—and if you’re in the area, go see him. He’s awesome. (And if you like metal with female vocalists, tell him your favorite bands. He’ll be into it.)

The verdict? DAMN.

He told me my C1 vertebra was a full 4 degrees out of alignment. (For comparison: my partner’s was 1.2 degrees off due to abysmal work ergonomics). After just one visit, it felt like someone had slid a pillow under my entire left side. Turns out, that side of my body had literally dropped a full inch (2.54 cm).

Let me reiterate: I had spent years doing CrossFit, doing high-impact weight-lifting on unbalanced bones while strengthening my muscles into the wrong position.

In January 2020, I returned to Canada for a full six weeks of treatment. I house-sat for my aunt while she wintered in Panama and went to the clinic every day to get my neck popped gently back into place. After about five treatments, Dr. Brown got my back to finally crack—and it was such a profound release that I almost cried right then and there. It was intense.

The plan was to return in the summer for a follow-up round.

But… January 2020... something significant happened shortly after that, didn’t it?

Oh yeah, I got pandemic-ed. I got back to Finland less than a week before travel restrictions hit. Needless to say, the follow-up never happened. I haven’t made it back to Canada since.

Introduction to Osteopathy

If you had asked me what an osteopath was in 2020, I would have told you that I had absolutely no idea, because “osteo-” implies bones in the original Latin, but I had only ever heard it referred to as some sort of homeopathic practice.

Nevertheless, when I couldn’t do NUCCA anymore, I was eventually referred to a woman named Sari Hakasaari—one of the most highly rated osteopaths in Finland—and started seeing her occasionally since—bonus—her practice was in my old neighborhood! She worked manually, moving my body around to coax things back where they belonged.

Then, in summer 2021, I was recommended a different osteopath named Kari Pokki. He does something called “biodynamic osteopathy,” which is more subtle. Instead of physically manipulating the body, he uses extremely light touch—often doing little more than gently resting his fingertips on key points—and encourages one’s body to reset itself.

Both approaches have their benefits: Sari’s is fast and hands-on, good for when I’m in active severe pain; Kari’s is far more subtle in action, but tends to hold better long-term. Since 2021, they’ve been playing what feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole with my body. Every time something gets fixed, something else pops out to compensate.

Where Western Doctors Failed Me Entirely

I just want to pause here for a second, because this part matters.

So far it sounds like I didn’t go to Western doctors at all, but I did. It’s just that they didn’t do anything, so it tends to get left out of the story.

After the initial accident, the German doctor gave me an x-ray, confirmed nothing was broken, and sent me home. My neck literally couldn’t hold up my head—I probably needed a brace, or at least some follow-up. But I got nothing. And that set the tone for how I dealt with it.

If the doctor didn’t tell me to do anything or give me follow-up after I received a pretty common and well-known injury, there was nothing to be done… right?

Eventually, I did go see a doctor though, in around 2017—mostly out of desperation. My foot pain had gotten bad enough that I went to the university clinic. They, unfortunately, had no idea what was causing it.

They suggested surgery to remove one of my sesamoid bones—a floating bone that often breaks and rarely causes pain. They pitched it as, “Well, we can try this and see if it helps, if you want.”

Back then, I was open to anything. Now? There’s no way I’d agree to any form of surgery without knowing the cause of the problem, even if it was minor and uninvasive. Why? Because I’ve since learned people recover from things like torn ACLs through massage and patience, in ways that don’t cause permanent damage to the body.

Note: Surgery absolutely has its time and place, like when your appendix is about to explode. I am not anti-surgery, but I am surgery-skeptical ever since I realized that there are tons of other viable alternatives to many surgeries—like sports injuries—that Western doctors just don’t offer.

Western medicine loves a quick fix, and sometimes, healing needs time and patience.

The final time I saw a doctor because of my chronic pain, the guy basically shrugged. He said, “I don’t have anything for you. Just take painkillers and keep seeing your osteopath and doing whatever you feel helps. Sorry you have to pay for that out of pocket.”

And that was it. That’s the help I got from our highly glorified Western medicine.

The Latest Breakthrough

In hindsight, I was taught that breath was important for years… I just didn’t realize how important.

I first learned pranayama (“yoga breathing”) when I was doing Ashtanga yoga in my late teens. It taught me how to oxygenate and energize my body with breath, and that I should always inhale and lengthen, then exhale and relax.

I occasionally used this technique when hiking or during CrossFit and noticed that I performed better. My asthma doesn’t trigger if I keep my mouth shut.

Then, when I started singing lessons in 2020, I learned something new about breath: that I should be drawing it deep into my belly.

Wait… into my belly?

That stirred an old but vivid memory of lying next to my parents as a young child, watching their stomachs rise and fall. I remember thinking, “Why is the air going into their tummies? Lungs are in the chest.”

Apparently that thought might have been all it took to subconsciously condition myself out of breathing properly.

Then, in 2024, I read Breath by James Nestor—on recommendation from Kari, of course—which turned out to be one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read. Go read it, seriously, it might change your life. It explores how mouth-breathing links to poor general health and worsened ADHD, and references documented cases of people healing “incurable” conditions like emphysema and scoliosis through breathwork alone.

By then, I was starting to piece things together. But for some reason, I still didn’t really feel like anything was getting better.

Why Does Healing Feel Like Pain?

I can maybe feel 30% of what Kari says are huge successes. I chalk this up to my body being uninterested in talking to me—I ignored its pain signals for so many years, why would it want to speak up now? If it heals, it does so quietly, only notifying me when the change is loud and dramatic.

So despite seeing osteopaths on and off since 2020—and at least monthly since the end of 2023—why am I still such a goddamn mess? Why do I still get crippled by back pain so intense it buckles my knees? You’d think, by now, I’d be getting better… not worse.

Believe me, I’m frustrated too. But Kari regularly mumbles at me to be patient. It took me a long time to figure out what he meant—I’ll get into that more in part 2. But suffice it to say, it’s been discouraging to keep shelling out money I don’t really have for treatments that often feel like they go nowhere.

The Union Leader Awakens

Imagine you’re the CEO of a massive corporation—say, a billion-dollar webshop. You’ve got workers in every department, all shouting about unsafe conditions and terrible pay, while you go about your day ignoring them.

Now imagine that, after being ignored for years, those workers elect a union leader. Someone who steps up and says: “Get help or get fucked.”

That’s what happened in my body. My union leader is a joint in the middle of my thoracic spine that lit up a chorus of “We’re Not Gonna Take It” at the front door of my brain back in spring 2024. It stepped up on behalf of everyone and held me at gunpoint. And by “gunpoint,” I mean spinal spasms.

Ever had one? It’s not fun. They ranged from little 1/10 twitches to full-blown 10/10 agony, shooting throughout my entire body. The worst one made me scream. I never knew what to expect—I only knew if it would be mild… or if I had better brace myself before my next inhale.

Kari doesn’t talk much during sessions, but during one of my first visits when the spasms began, he mumbled something about my body not getting enough oxygen to some random part.

I even took up breath meditation in the summer, sitting in the yard and grounding with the earth. I even enjoyed it way more than mindfulness. I really thought I was improving and helping things.

Except still… nothing was getting better.

Breath

So, in late March 2025, I came to an astounding realization about my body. Even though I was working on my posture and my breath, I was still doing it wrong.

I was exploring my symptoms when I realized how much I was still breathing into my chest, not my stomach. I had assumed that I had accidentally badly programmed myself as a child, but I thought I had been working on it.

“Breathe in and lengthen your spine,” is what yoga taught me. I always breathed up and in, lengthening my spine. Or so I thought. It turns out, there is a difference between stretching and lengthening. And if you’ve trained your lungs to feel full when your ribs have expanded up and out? You’re probably doing the former.

Think of it this way: imagine one of those thin balloons that a clown uses to make animals. There’s a pretty big difference if you just pull the ends of the balloon as tight as they go, compared to expanding it from the inside.

Oh yeah. I was still breathing fully into my chest with my pranayama, which was stretching my spine, expanding my ribs, and flattening my stomach. My lungs had no idea what “full” meant or felt like.

When I figured this out, I sat down and started to pull my breath down into the deepest pit of my abdomen, trying to inflate myself like a beach volleyball. And after doing this maybe five or so times… I felt something different.

I could feel my ribs shifting, my shoulder-blades moving, and my spine expanding, as though bones that had been clamped together were getting pumped apart. The lower back strain that is ever-present began to ease off.

I ended up spending a good deal of time that afternoon working on my breath and adding simple movements that I’ve learned over the years as I went. I’ll detail what I did and why in a follow-up article for anyone who’s interested. The TL;DR version for now is that—after some 2-4 hours of focusing on my breath and doing extremely simple stretches—things started moving on their own and different parts of my body began to speak up. It was a pretty intense ride, but by the end, I felt like the union leader and I had come to an agreement:

We start slow. We start simple. We start with breath.

And we graduate when we’re ready.

So Where Am I Now?

Back on Instagram and Facebook, I saw a lot of memes going around about how getting old is rough on the body.

We seem to have, as a collective, decided that this is normal and that we should just suck it up or take painkillers. I'm sure unpacking that would be a wormhole for a whole other article, but suffice to say, I am astounded by our collective lack of hope when it comes to living with pain.

Don't get me wrong, I still have chronic pain. It still moves all around. But now I've stopped treating my body like something to just suck up and deal with. This isn't just a shift in the way I exist physically though—it's also about how I perceive and treat my body.

We don’t actually need to abuse ourselves and stay in pain all the time. We could stand to be a little nicer to our bodies, not just by pushing them, but by listening to what they actually need.

…Oh hell, was that hippy physiotherapist actually right?

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Broken Body Series: I Was in a Patriarchal Relationship with My Body (So No Wonder it Fucking Hates Me)!

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