Claire came for Bowen after a spell of vertigo - a sensation where a person feels that they are spinning, or the space around them is spinning. It is usually caused by a problem with the inner ear.

Initially Claire took a week off work as she had been feeling under increasing stress and wondered if that might have been causing the vertigo. However, the vertigo remained, and she also began to notice that it was particularly triggered when she was eating and knitting - times when her head was forward and looking downwards. At the same time she experienced pins and needles in her right hand, and also pain on the soles of her feet. The tingling in her hands was most likely to be caused by an issue in the neck, and the pain in her feet could have been due to tension in the 'superficial back line' of fascia that connects the top of our head to underneath our toes.

On treating her I found that the muscles that run down the front of the neck (sternocleidomastoid or SCM) were very tight. Even when these muscles are tight, they often do not cause any associated neck pain, but do affect the alignment of other key areas in the body. These muscles can often be an area that is overlooked when trying to find a cause of vertigo.
Claire returned for her second visit the following week and reported that she was feeling 'energized and positive'. She had experienced some aching over the SCM muscles but I reassured her that this was sometimes a temporary outcome of muscles beginning to release and the body realign. This week I corrected some misalignment at her coccyx - it was then that she remembered she had fallen on this area in a horse riding accident.
The following week, she reported that her neck and jaw had felt better after treatment, and that her dizzy spells had reduced significantly. She also mentioned that as a teenager her jaw used to lock from time to time. I worked over her jaw and also her psoas muscle - a muscle in the middle of the body that has strong fascial connections with the jaw (see post https://www.somersetbowen.co.uk/why-am-i-treating-your-jaw-when-its-your-hips-that-hurt)
Claire returned for her last visit a week later feeling 'great'. She now had no neck pain, her jaw was feeling much better, the vertigo was gone and the pain in her feet nor the pins and needles in her hand had reoccurred.
Claire said " My body was holding things so wrong that it couldn't function anymore. I couldn't do normal everyday tasks. I went from googling 'Am I going to die' to feeling normal again. There was so much tension in my neck that I had almost blocked it out - the treatment helped my body notice this and as a result I am feeling so much better"