Fit for 40: how an osteopathy course turned me into a crack addict
“It’s actually incredibly hard to kill someone this way,” said Duncan, grabbing my head and suddenly yanking it 45 degrees to the right – basically like he’s trying to kill me.
In a movie, I’d have dropped to the floor like a lead weight, profoundly dead. Shorn by the powerful hands of Duncan. But in reality, my neck blurted out a satisfying crack, and 40 years of anguish and broken dreams vanished from the surrounding muscles.
If I was dead then I was in heaven. But I wasn’t dead because I could still hear myself breathing (always a good sign).
To give the “baddie” of this story a bit more context, Duncan Webster is an osteopath and SPOILER ALERT, I’m his patient. Also, for the record, he definitely wasn’t trying to kill me – for legal reasons I really can’t emphasise that enough. If anything, he was trying to make me immortal.
I was in his underground lair in Pimlico for a six-session course of osteopathy as part of my ongoing quest for self-betterment. A quest that began last year when I saw 40 looming on the horizon, wearing nothing but the promise of existential doom. According to various reports, after turning 40 I would become more prone to stress and depression, weaker than ever before, less fun to be around and more likely to get ill.
Well, not on my watch. I’ve decided to make it my mission to raise a defiant finger to the thunderclouds, to kick convention in the short and curlies, and to fight my way into an upward trajectory.
So far it’s going pretty well. I’ve endured a week of veganism (it didn’t take), I’ve been bolstered and coddled by a life coach, I’ve come to love meditation, and I have embraced physical exercise in a way that I never would have expected. Would visiting an osteopath also make it onto my list of things to continue doing?
Why I did it
After years of typing overwrought paragraphs for a living, I have the posture of a 90-year-old coal miner, and with one leg marginally shorter than the other, I have always walked with a waddle. If I could improve on either of these things, it would make me euphorically happy.
Also I’ve never really been one for massages as a form of leisure and relaxation – I tend to find them either a bit awkward, or dreary – but osteopathy seems to me like massage for the impatient. Massage with a purpose. All cracking bones and getting stuff done, no mucking around with whale noises and joss sticks, or trying to find your happy place.
In short, I was intrigued.
How was it?
Honestly, great.
The plan, as proposed to me by Danny Orchard and Duncan Webster – the brains behind an affordable osteopathy treatment centre called CORE, which will be fixing the unfixable in London’s borough of Hackney from June this year – was to try out a two-month course, once a week at first, and then once a fortnight to see how it went. Six sessions in total.
The tagline they use for CORE is “getting you back to what you enjoy doing most”, or if they’re feeling a little more earnest “everyone deserves a pain free life”. But ultimately, the driving message of the business is that osteopathy isn’t just there for neck or back problems, it can fix a whole host of other issues, like migraines, or digestive issues, or even the looming threat of “chronic pain”, which is said to affect more than half of the population as we get older.
“I’m a fan of osteopathy,” my friend Leo tells me. “A big fan – it did wonders for my back.”
So as I turned up for that first session, with my untreated posture making me look like a hipster Quasimodo, I was hoping for minor miracles.
My Osteopathy Diary (the highlights)
Session 1
“We essentially do our utmost to get your body functioning as it should,” Duncan tells me.
I remove my top so that he can see me in my full glory, while I run him through a short catalogue of woes: posture issues, occasional mid-back pain, occasional lower back pain, stiffness pretty much everywhere, sporadic joint ache, general ennui.
“Your posture is terrible,” he agrees, “but please don’t take that personally, it’s my job to insult your body and then fix it.”
He spends about half an hour manipulating my bones, cracking my back, kneading my neck – the whole thing is pretty agonising, but afterwards, I feel amazing.
Session 2
A shorter session than the initial induction, clocking in at around half an hour. More back cracking, Duncan “manipulates my lower spine” because it’s “incredibly tight down there”.
I tell him about an inexplicable agony in my foot which turns out to be a bunion. Duncan, with his forceful hands, makes short, painful shrift of it, and the problem that has been bugging me off-and-on for weeks just disappears.
I leave somehow feeling YOUNGER.
Session 3
A few years ago in Thailand, I went for a massage, and what followed was one of the most brutal hours of my entire life. Osteopathy makes that look like being tickled.
Duncan stretches out my hamstrings to the point where my legs feels like they’re about to burst into flames, he is a satnav programed to locate the high point of physical discomfort.
Afterwards, I feel like I’m 21. Osteopathy may be turning into my crack pipe.
Session 4
For this session, we look at breathing, and how calmer breaths come from your stomach, rather than from your chest. Turns out I’ve even been getting breathing wrong my whole life.
We try out an exercise where I have to breathe through my stomach as Duncan puts weight onto. I later demonstrate this to my wife, and she seems genuinely impressed.
I consider charging her twenty quid.
Session 5
We’d left a fortnight between sessions, so I have to fight the urge to greet Duncan with a hug.
“Today, we’re going to try something a little unusual,” he tells me, before lying me on my back and essentially massaging my insides for twenty minutes, like a man doing the washing up through a thick layer of skin.
I can’t remember the exact order of things, but I’m pretty sure that at one point he was prodding my spleen and as a direct result my leg got bendier.
Session 6
It was with a heavy heart that I arrived for my final session.
“I should have taken a photo at the start to show how bad you looked,” says Duncan, observing my new, improved posture.
The posture of a Greek god.
A posture so upright that people have actually asked me if I’ve lost weight, which I categorically have not.
For this session, there’s a nod to acupuncture, as Duncan pops various needles into my back to see if they will relax any tightness. Followed by one last neck crack for the road.
Will I be incorporating osteopathy into my post-40 lifestyle?
Unequivocally yes. I’m a convert, to the point where I’ve been boring people to death telling them to go along and have a session. It genuinely makes you feel younger.
There’s no sitting around in fluffy white towels, no scented candles making you feel queasy, this is just straight to business, looking to reinvigorate your body and make you feel younger.
My plan is to aim for an hour session every couple of months, at a cost of around £50 a go – my treat to myself.
CORE in Hackney opens in June 2017, visit the website at http://www.corecic.com/
