Dystonia as biomechanical trauma: my experience

Many of us are diagnosed with vegetative-vascular dystonia (VVD – a popular in ex-USSR dyagnosis, that means chronic fatigue and headaches). At the same time, many of us have already tried all the types of treatment proposed by doctors of different specialties – from morning body exercises and manual therapy to vasodilators and psychotherapy, but we found that none of this brings long-term relief. Probably, I would have continued to live, especially since I had VVD in a rather mild form. But once, of my own free will, I turned to doctors who were not very well versed in their business…

In this article I want to share my experiences with the VVD, that I passed through on my own “skin”, and those unexpected discoveries that, willy-nilly, I had to make, being in an uncontrollable flow, which was generated in my body by low-quality dental intervention.

What is vegetative-vascular dystonia

Vegetovascular dystonia (VVD) is a disease of the central nervous system that occurs in forty percent of the world’s population. This is a generally accepted postulate of official ex-USSR medicine. She refers to the symptoms of vegetative-vascular dystonia: increased heart rate and pain in the heart, difficulty breathing, increased or decreased pressure, weakness, sweating, rapid fatigue, poor circulation, cold extremities or fever, trembling hands, “lump in the throat”, pain in the abdomen and bowel disturbances, emotional changes, general anxiety, etc. The official causes of VVD are diseases of the central nervous system, infectious and colds, as well as cervical osteochondrosis and subluxation of the first cervical vertebra, hormonal disruptions and some chronic diseases of internal organs. At the same time, autonomic symptoms related to VVD are considered secondary in traditional medicine and arising against the background of mental and somatic diseases.

It is worth noting that there is no VVD diagnosis in the International Classification of Diseases, as well as the term “neurocirculatory dystonia” close to it. At the same time, the omniscient Wikipedia clarifies that VVD is an outdated and controversial diagnosis, which is “accompanied by inappropriate and ineffective treatment measures that worsen the prognosis of the disease and the quality of life of patients”. Nevertheless, this diagnosis, which includes a large number of different symptoms, continues to be made to patients in ex-USSR countries to this day, and today a large number of ineffective treatment measures are applied to them.

In European and American medicine, there is a diagnosis of cervical dystonia, when a patient suffers from muscle spasms that cause him to tilt the head. In our minds the term “torticollis” is the closest to it in its meaning. However, in the West, patients suffering from the above symptoms are usually diagnosed with hypochondria – the same vague diagnosis as the “Soviet” VVD, which also implies the psychosomatic nature of this disease. Let me disagree, because all my experience testified to the opposite…

My story 

VVD – I started to be diagnosed with it began to from adolescence, when in just a few months I was very “stretched”, and at the same time I grew thin. I started having headaches and began to feel tired. At the same time, I was diagnosed with a “small scoliosis”, which outwardly was practically invisible, and instability of the second and third cervical vertebrae, “which everyone has, and everyone lives with it”.

I was recommended to go in for sports, which I actively and gladly began to do, having tried literally everything – from female bodybuilding to meditative stretching and dancing. It really helped, and it was quite enough to live a normal life. The only prerequisite for a normal existence for me was a lot of sleep, otherwise, if I had to get up early, I felt like a vegetable. But all my studies took place in the second part of the day, so I didn’t notice a particular problem, continuing to develop and try to make my dreams come true.

Many of my acquaintances got braces, smiling then confidently with their straight teeth. I decided to follow this fashion too. On the lower arch of teeth near the canine, it was a bit crowded, and I really wanted to solve all this in order to become well, absolutely perfect and stunning, because at that time it seemed to me that appearance is the most important thing for a woman. This “problem” was solved for me by removing the canine and tightening the resulting gap with braces. From the braces on my upper teeth, my head and bones of my face began to ache badly, but since “beauty requires sacrifice”, I endured stoically. My orthodontist decided to remove my wisdom tooth as well. Since “the doctor knows best”, I did not mind. And it was this event that divided my life into “before and after”.

Even in the surgeon’s chair, as soon as “this atavism” was removed, I suddenly felt dizziness and nausea, my stomach seemed to “jump up” and the frontal part of my face from the side of the extracted tooth contracted. This “acute” state lasted about two months, during which I began to notice that my character was changing – from a calm and balanced person, I began to turn into a nervous compressed being who wanted only one thing – peace. My orthodontist said that I had “too many complaints”, took off the braces, put retention splints on both arches, and with a Hollywood smile sent me into my new life. But, as it turned out, this was only the beginning.

Vertebral artery syndrome (thoracic outlet syndrome)

Returning to the possible causes of vegetative-vascular dystonia, it is impossible not to note the actively discussed today on the Internet syndrome of the vertebral artery and the work of the Lithuanian surgeon Povilas Pauliukas, who is not without reason convinced that the pinching of the vertebral artery occurs under the scalene muscle, and this problem can be solved by removing it. Pinching of the vertebral artery at its mouths (the clavicle region) is called thoracic outlet syndrome in Western literature, and is an extremely difficult disease to diagnose, since many neurologists and doctors of other fields don’t have this knowledge. Povilas Pauliukas has an excellent work on this topic “Vertebrobasilar insufficiency: causes, symptoms, diagnostic evaluation and surgical treatment”, which largely clarifies the origin of the symptoms of dizziness, unsteadiness, lack of concentration, “brain fog” and emotional problems arising from a lack of blood supply to the brain.

I visited Povilas (I will discuss it below), but here I would like to note an important, in my opinion, lack of his research – he pays attention only to the compression of the vertebral artery at its mouths and under the scalene muscle, but ignores the fact of its possible pinching in the first cervical vertebra, which can often occur when it is displaced and aggravated by Kimmerle’s anomaly (a bone ring around the vertebral artery in the region of the posterior arch of the atlas). Perhaps this explains the fact that five out of ten of his former patients, with whom I corresponded, were ready to literally kiss his hands and called him a savior, and another five called him “a butcher” and “charlatan”. Now it is important for us to pay attention to the fact that the vertebral artery syndrome, as research confirms, is caused by changes in the cervical vertebrae – their osteochondrosis, and the accompanying changes in the normal length and tone of the neck muscles.

New “happy” life 

After my tooth was removed, I began to feel that my head had stopped “breathing”. It was only recently that I learned that a person in such cases has a blockage of cranial sutures, but then, in a complete lack of understanding of what was happening, I really suffered. Changes in physics instantly led to changes at the level of the psyche. If earlier I reacted absolutely calmly to aggressive people, and feeling my relaxed state, they calmed down, now I myself increasingly began to experience unreasonable aggression. Years of dancing and meditation allowed me to look at all this from the outside and not allow me to plunge into this condition, but I began to move more and more away from people and become more and more withdrawn. I began to forget what the pleasure of flirting and communication is. Communication with friends more and more slipped into talking on the phone, because after an hour of lively facial expressions and laughing, I felt spasms in the back of my head and solar plexus for several days. I understood that the point was not in the psyche, and that all these pains were a direct consequence of some physical problem, but what kind of problem it was, and what I should do now, I didn’t know.

Communication became painful also because I was used to looking into the eyes of my interlocutor, and after that I was plagued by tension around my eyes and a spasmodic forehead and crown to the limit. These spasms were accompanied by “smearing” of the surrounding world and almost “insensibility” of oneself. In addition, something began to happen to my diaphragm – it seemed to tighten, no matter how I tried to relax it with stretching and breathing. With laughter or intense emotions – no matter, positive or negative, it shrank, and something similar to gastritis began, although after two days of rest it passed the same way as it began. At the same time, I felt emotional stress, isolation and anxiety. This is a very painful condition, so on an intuitive level I began to avoid any factors that provoke it. And they included both intense physical activity and any strong emotions that are inevitable in healthy human communication. I felt my natural liveliness slipping into a frigid state of mind, striving for an old woman’s peace. I had to leave my favorite dances, with which there were many hopes in my life, creative work at the computer due to spasms in the back of my head also became almost impossible (although I still managed to work a little as much as I could). Despite all my ambitions, I actually ended up on my parents’ neck, willy-nilly feeling incapable of taking care of myself as an infantile.

Since the doctors diagnosed only the notorious VVD due to the “possible lability of the psyche”, and all the examinations were normal, I gradually came to terms with this state of affairs, trying to develop myself to the maximum even in such a limited space, and already tuned in to the fact that until the end life I will be lonely. But fate is an interesting thing, and even with all my “shell” life, it still managed to bring me together with interesting people and teased me with my old taste for life. So I met a man who accepted me with my incomprehensible state and stimulated me to further search for a way out of my situation (a lot of changed since that time as I wrote this article 3 years ago). I started visiting massage therapists, the best chiropractors (but I only had a severe headache after that), I tried homeopathy, acupuncture, and even turned to psychics. The best psychotherapist in my city after some time told me: “You are a very courageous girl, and thanks to you I dared to make changes in my life”. At that moment, I realized that psychotherapy had to be finished, especially the best psychotherapy for me was body-oriented, and it was this, feeling physically blocked, that I couldn’t do.

Osteopathy helped me in the most magical way, when the next day after the session a wonderful feeling of my old health and a surge of energy suddenly returned to me. But alas, it lasted only until the first physical activity. I continued to visit my osteopath, but over time, the initially received state returned less and less. For a very short time, I was helped by droppers with vasodilating nootropil, but after the fifth day I already began to suffer painful overflow of my head, and I only occasionally injected myself with a cube intramuscularly to relieve very severe spasms. This is how I lived for four years, until one morning I discovered a strange, pea-sized mass under my jaw joint. Frightened, I ran to see the maxillofacial surgeon, who said that it was an inflamed lymph node and diagnosed me with TMD – dysfunction of the temporomandibular joint. But, as it turned out, this was only the beginning, and everything that I experienced before was just “flowers”.

TMJ and its connection with the vertebrae and muscles of the neck

You can say what does the VVD to TMD have to do with, and that you did not have braces or extracted teeth, but, “only, perhaps, vertebral artery syndrome due to cervical osteochondrosis”, and that “flies are needed to be separately, and cutlets separately” (as say Russians). Accustomed to the same perception by traditional medicine, I used to be also confident in the separate “ingredients” of the human body. In this regard, it is interesting that at the end of his book Povilas Pauliukas says that it is important to distinguish between vertebral artery syndrome and TMD, that give similar symptoms. What the unwinding of this “thread” led me to – I want to tell you. I went to this angiosurgeon when the case became quite serious (what led to this – I will mention below). During my visit, Povilas did an ultrasound of my vertebral arteries and concluded that they were being clamped at its mouths (like many who wrote reviews on the forums). He offered me an operation to remove my scalene muscles, but my intuition told me to wait.

I also managed to get an appointment with the world-renowned angiosurgeon Jan Blankensteijn. He also diagnosed me compression of the vertebral arteries near their mouth, but he wasn’t so optimistic about the success of the operation. He honestly said that in Europe, such surgeries have practically ceased to be performed, since the effect of them is 50/50, and that in many successful patients the symptoms return after some time. I told him that I have TMD, and he replied that although he is not an expert in TMD, “the neck and jaw are connected by a complex system of muscles”, and that it would be better for me to start treating this particular problem. At that time, it was difficult for me to understand the connection between the position of the jaw and its effect on the neck and, especially, the vertebral artery, but somehow I came across one of the first scientific confirmations of this connection – that the work of the Italian professor Stefanelli, who worked according to a system that was incomprehensible to me then when he balanced the patient’s jaw, and that person got decompression of his vertebral artery as a “bonus”. The photo below shows compression before treatment and decompression after:

I was fortunate enough to meet one of these famous doctors Geir Olsen, who turned out to be the most pleasant person, completely devoid of the ego usual for such doctors. He told me about “Italian guys who found a way to cure TMD without any doctors”, and he advised me to read their book about the effect of the position of the jaw on the cervical vertebrae and neck muscles and the whole body. This book by the founder of the Starecta method, a simple guy from Italy Moreno Conte, who for many years suffered from much more severe symptoms than me, became a real revelation for me, which turned all my views on modern medicine and the human body. But as this guy wrote, “Before you straighten up, you have to be broken”. And before all these discoveries, this happened to me.

“Treatment” of TMD with mouthguards

After the diagnosis was made, the maxillofacial surgeon referred me to the best orthodontist at the department of the medical institute in my city. He, in turn, sent me to make numerous X-rays and diagnosed me with a displacement of the lower jaw in three projections (in medical language, all this is difficult to write, so I write in simple words). The doctor made me a mouthguard, I went to bed with it and… I woke up the next morning with a sharp pain in the middle of my neck, a continuous spasm in the back of my head, head and face and, most importantly, depression! I try not to let myself get discouraged, and it was something new, and it was clearly a consequence of physical impact. I felt shaky and dizzy when I tried to get up. I immediately pulled out the mouthguard, injected a cube of nootropil, and within two days the spasms disappeared, and depression gone with them.

The doctor who gave me the mouthguard said that “apparently, the changes in the body are already profound”, and I need to wear it for an hour a day. I did that regularly, but it did not lead to anything. Another specialist, to whom this doctor referred me, said that due to the removed canine, the teeth on one side “lie”, and braces must be placed, but this is dangerous, since “braces can have an aggressive effect on the joint”. In the end, he also made me a mouthguard, which had the same effect as the first one. There was also a maxillofacial doctor abroad, but he said that he could do an operation that “is unlikely to help.” I try to describe all this without emotions, but in fact it was scary and hard for me – having a specific diagnosis, I understood that doctors didn’t know how to treat TMD, and even on the forums I read stories of the same people who had lost hope.

Dangers of manual exposure

“You have to go to him, because there are masseurs, and this is a Masseur!” – said another neurologist in the clinic. I went. The “massage” turned out to be quite hard manipulations with the body, when the chiropractor (and the “masseur” turned out to be him) made a “propeller” out of my body, turning my hips in one direction, and crunched my shoulders with a crunch right up to the couch in the other side, took it by the ankles and, asking to resist, twisted them in the opposite direction, “ruled” my neck. On the fifth day of such manipulations, I started having lower back pain, and I could not bend over, but the masseur told me to come on. Intuition told me that something was wrong, but I reassured myself that I was doing this “massage” in the clinic, and at the “Masseur”.

On the eighth session, I started having a severe headache and vomiting, but the chiropractor said “take a day off” and come to finish the course. In the ninth session, he did the same rigid scheme with my body, twisted my head, tilted it back, pushing his fingers upward from the back of the head with pressure and… I started shaking. Shaking me this way continued for eight months. But at that moment something like a panic started and fear went through my body, my arms and legs began to tremble. At night I woke up with a terrible heartbeat and a strange sensation in the sacrum. I tried to breathe and relax, but nothing worked. It began to tighten the ribs, began not only fear, but the animal horror of the approach of death. Vomiting began, which lasted five hours. The ambulance recorded a pressure of 180, I don’t remember second numeral – but I have never had this before. It turned out to be a “regular panic attack”. Since then, it began every night for eight months, until my body was at least a little balanced and found a new balance. I did not sleep, hardly ate, a light sleeping pill allowed me to forget everything only for a couple of unrefreshing hours.

But that was not all – within two weeks after the last session, something happened to the structure of my body – my head and pelvis moved forward, and my chest literally fell inside, one shoulder became higher than the other. At the same time, my neck stretched and narrowed, like a giraffe. My head and face stopped “breathing” at all. What was going on with my psyche – you can imagine, and I wouldn’t like to remember this. All I could do was lie down and watch positive programs about travellings, which, as I thought then, would never be in my life again.

VVD as biomechanical injury

What happened to my body, I realized only after reading Moreno Conte’s book – even after my jaw was displaced, my body, accustomed to sports loads, compensated for the imbalance with the muscles, but the masseur removed all muscle compensations, and, without suspecting it, adjusted my skeleton and skull to a new one displaced jaw position. I have already described what happened to the muscles, arteries and nerves. It would have happened anyway – gradually over twenty or thirty years or during pregnancy, so in my case, it may be good that it happened that way. I suppose that the rudiments of trauma (malocclusion and imbalance of the skull) were in me for a long time, they simply were not detected by doctors of narrow specialties, and after the orthodontist changed the position of my jaw, postural collapse was really only a matter of time. I have experienced firsthand how important the balance of the jaw is, how it affects the bones of the skull, vertebrae, muscles, arteries, veins and internal organs, and what a devastating effect on the body can be thoughtless dental intervention.

Being in this condition, I was looking for what could help me, and I saw on the Internet the amazing works of Dr. Savinov, the founder of craniodontics in Russia. In short, he corrects distortions of the skull, jaw joints and jaws, while achieving almost impossible symmetry of the face and body. In my search, I met a considerable number of people, both high-class doctors and people who, suffering from numerous symptoms that cannot be treated by traditional medicine, literally scrambled out from the very bottom on their own, balancing their jaw and increasing the height of their bite. So I learned about the story of an American guy Ken, who suffered from shoulder pain, back pain and “brain fog”, and, exhausted by years of “blind treatment” by doctors of many specialties, got out of the crisis with the Moreno Conte Starecta method. You can read his story here. I also found out about a Spaniard who got dystonia almost instantly after the dentist sharpened the contacts of his teeth on one side. He began his own research on the influence of the cranio-jaw system on the onset of dystonia after undergoing the Starecta method. Photos of him before and after treatment can be seen below:

At the moment, I am also on biomechanical treatment, and all materials related to this process will appear on the pages of this blog. But now I can say that I again gradually began to return to the body and feel. I began to work and communicate slowly again. I can’t say that I’m traveling yet, but at least I can already withstand long trips. I don’t know how Moreno Conte decided to describe his experience so frankly, and also upload his photos. I’m rather embarrassed to describe my experiences, but still I can’t help but do it. As I’ve learned from my hard-won experience, dental occlusion affects the position of the upper and lower jaw and the position of the skull in general. The position of the skull and jaw affects the vertebrae and muscles of the neck and all descending structures of the body. At the same time, a change in the length and tone of muscles can cause compression of the life-supporting arteries and affect the normal blood supply to the brain and, as a result, the emotional and mental state of a person.

As the experience of such “volunteers” shows, the diagnosis of VVD, which is being made today to numerous patients, is nothing more than a myth, and it is based on real biomechanical trauma. A person can get such an injury to his jaw-cranial system at any stage of his life, or at birth (or even as a result of an unsuccessful prenatal lying in the womb). They are trying to treat such people locally – separate vertebrae, arteries, psyche in isolation from the body, not paying attention to the fact that the human body is a single self-regulating system. Maybe it’s time to go up from the local level to a higher level and look at the problem in its entirety? Maybe people suffering from the chameleon disease “VVD” actually suffer from an unidentified imbalance of the jaw and skull? The processes of biomechanics of the skull and lower jaw and their effect on the spine and the body are still being studied in science, but it is no longer possible to ignore the experience of people who have got rid of “VVD” and numerous associated symptoms in people who have gone this way.

Continuation of my story.