Back Whisperer: Rethinking Chronic Pain & Movement with Amanda Harris on The Healers Café with Manon Bolliger

In this episode of The Healers Café, Manon Bolliger, FCAH, RBHT (facilitator and retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice) speaks to Amanda discuss the limitations of conventional medical approaches, particularly in dealing with chronic pain and movement-related issues.

Highlights from today’s episode include:

Amanda recounts her journey of hopping from physical therapist to physical therapist, seeking resolution for her back pain, and eventually finding a solution through a combination of osteopathic care and exercise physiology.

 

 

 

Amanda explains her approach to treating clients, which involves understanding the underlying movement patterns and nervous system issues.

– – – – –

Manon and Amanda discuss the future of healthcare, emphasizing the importance of integrating different approaches and providing personalized care.

ABOUT AMANDA HARRIS:

Amanda Harris is the owner and founder of Re-Kinect Medical Exercise in Richmond, Virginia. She specializes in working with people who have chronic low back pain for any number of reasons, including disc herniation, spinal stenosis and various spinal surgeries. In addition, she has extensive experience working with those who have undergone total knee, hip or shoulder replacement.


Amanda has over 25 years of experience in post-rehabilitative and medical exercise, and is passionate about helping people return to the activities they enjoy after injury or surgery. She has had the good fortune of collaborating with top physicians and physical therapists over the course of her career.


Her unique approach includes using carefully selected and graded exercises and movement patterns to teach the body how to move better and without pain. Breathwork, mindset training and education on what’s happening in your body reduces stress and brings about the positive environment needed to truly heal and move beyond pain.


Amanda’s credentials include:
Master’s Degree: Exercise Physiology from the University of Virginia
Certification: Medical Exercise Specialist from the Medical Exercise Training Institute
Certification: Redcord Active Specialist from Redcord International
Certification: Neurokinetic Therapy Level 1

Core purpose/passion: My core purpose and mission: to help people free themselves from bodily pain–not just for now, but in the future as well–so they can resume the active lifestyles they love.

 

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ABOUT MANON BOLLIGER, FCAH, RBHT

As a recently De-Registered board-certified naturopathic physician & in practice since 1992, I’ve seen an average of 150 patients per week and have helped people ranging from rural farmers in Nova Scotia to stressed out CEOs in Toronto to tri-athletes here in Vancouver.

My resolve to educate, empower and engage people to take charge of their own health is evident in my best-selling books:  ‘What Patients Don’t Say if Doctors Don’t Ask: The Mindful Patient-Doctor Relationship’ and ‘A Healer in Every Household: Simple Solutions for Stress’.  I also teach BowenFirst™ Therapy through Bowen College and hold transformational workshops to achieve these goals.

So, when I share with you that LISTENING to Your body is a game changer in the healing process, I am speaking from expertise and direct experience”.

Mission: A Healer in Every Household!

For more great information to go to her weekly blog:  http://bowencollege.com/blog

For tips on health & healing go to: https://www.drmanonbolliger.com/tips

 

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About The Healers Café:

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* De-Registered, revoked & retired naturopathic physician after 30 years of practice in healthcare. Now resourceful & resolved to share with you all the tools to take care of your health & vitality!

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction  00:00

Welcome to the Healers Café. The number one show for medical practitioners and holistic healers, to have heart to heart conversations about their day to day lives, while sharing their expertise for improving your health and wellness.

Manon Bolliger  00:17

Welcome to the Healers Cafe, and today I have Amanda Harris, and she’s the owner and founder of recon, connect, reconnect. I know why, and I was like stumbling, reconnect, no reconnect, medical exercise in Virginia, and she specializes in working with people who have chronic low back pain for any number of reasons, including disc herniation, spinal stenosis and various spinal surgeries. In addition, she has extensive experience working with those who have undergone total knee, hip or shoulder replacement, and with over 25 years of experience in post rehabilitative and medical exercise, and she’s passionate about helping people return to the activities they enjoyed after injury and before their surgery, obviously, she has had the good fortune of collaborating with interesting, different therapist. And I think, yeah, you do movement therapy. Well, let’s, let’s just welcome you and take it from there. And maybe my first question to you is, what attracted you to that field?

 

Amanda Harris  01:45

Well, that’s that’s kind of an interesting question. I usually point to an injury that I had in college. I had a horse related injury in college that resulted in a really bad injury to one of the big ligaments that attaches my pelvis to my spine. And as a result of that injury, I have a chronic instability in my back. And before I understood that, that was what happened in that incident, because for many years, it went undiagnosed, I just hopped around from physical therapist to physical therapist looking for resolution of my pain, and had a hard time finding it. But I can honestly also say that before that happened, I was becoming very interested in that post rehab field. I won’t even say the rehab field, because I spent some time in doing some like, informal internships in my summers, you know, after my, like, senior year in college, when I was trying to decide what to do next. And I think that my interest in this field actually comes from riding horses, because I grew up riding a sport called dressage, which is like, sort of it’s pointed to, is like the ballet of horsemanship, or the gymnastics of horsemanship, and the whole goal of a good dressage rider is to create a balanced athlete out of your horse. So you have a horse with a particular problem, whether they turn left better than they turn right, or maybe they trot better than they can or your your goal is to try to even everything out and make them a better athlete. And so I think I already had a brain that worked that way. So when I was injured and was faced with, what do I do? And I was hopping around, you know, from from healthcare practitioner, healthcare practitioner, trying to find answers, I think that part of my brain got activated, if you know what I mean. So I wound up under the care of a really great osteopathic type physician who was able to interrupt some of the movement patterns in my body that were causing some really major spasms after I would do certain activities I was already I had graduated from graduate school in exercise physiology. I was trying to figure out what to do with that degree. I was looking at cardiac rehab as a career. But when, when all this went down and I was struggling with my back pain, I became intensely interested, of course, in finding a solution. And so that particular physician, although he had helped me more than anybody else, I kept going to him and saying, what else can I do? And finally, he kind of squared up on me one day, and he said, Amanda, you’re the exercise physiologist. Maybe this is what you’re supposed to figure out. And I remember it hit me like a bullet between the eyes. You know? It was like, oh, maybe this is where my career is supposed to go. Like it never had occurred to me before that that was where my career was going to go, and so I kind of instantly jumped into that problem solving mode and just started researching and taking courses and classes and everything that I could get my hands on in pursuit of a solution. And I finally started to get close to a solution when I was into. Introduced to a company out of Norway called red cord. And I was actually introduced to them by my my graduate school mentor. He called me one day because he knew I was, you know, really vehemently pursuing a solution for my back. And he called me and he said, You’ve got to get down to the lab. We’ve got these guys from Norway, and they are doing really amazing things with all sorts of pain. And so I came down the lab and got introduced. And what I started learning from those guys, and I mean, I jumped in when I when I figured out what kind of a solution they offered. What I started learning from those guys is stop training the muscles. You have to look at the nervous system, because the nervous system is in charge of the muscles. You know, the muscles are just taking orders from your brain and spinal cord. So if you’re really busy trying to help the muscles out, you’re missing the control center. And it was like, oh, you know, this was tremendous to me. And so I basically jumped in with both feet and started to learn everything they could teach me. But, but, you know, they say when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And so as I was learning that I was introduced, I moved to Richmond. In the meantime, I had been living in another town that was not far from Richmond. And when I moved to Richmond, I was introduced to another really talented osteopathic type physician. And I when I was introduced to him, I sat down with him, I told him what I was doing, because he he the first thing he said, out of his out of his, top of his head, to me was, I’m really not interested in talking to personal trainers. And I said, Well, you’re in luck, because I’m not a personal trainer, you know, I’m an exercise physiologist. I’m looking at this from a medical lens and a rehabilitative lens. I’m not interested in making people, you know, lift heavy weights and and bodybuild and do all those sorts of things, or or lose a ton of weight or whatever. That’s not where i My heart is. This is where my heart is. And as I explained it to him, and I told him what I had been learning from ..

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the red cord guys, he said, Oh. He said, you want to learn about the nervous system. Stick with me, because, as it turned out, he started his career as a neurologist. So he’s a neurologist, and he’s this osteopathic physician who was a wizard, and I found out after spending a lot of time with him a few years later, that he actually turned out to be one of the top osteopathic manual therapists, manual therapy physicians. He just happened to live where I was living. So I was very blessed to mentor under him for about 10 years. And I did. I milked him dry practically for everything that he could teach me, you know. And I would even ask him for neurology textbooks, and he would laugh at me, and he would say, you don’t need a textbook. You just need to come in here more often. So, so that’s what I did, and we had lots of conversations about the intersection between what he was doing with his patients and how I could carry that kind of work forward and better understand their movement related problems. And so it kind of that path, kind of made me into a unicorn of sorts. Because, you know, most exercise physiologists don’t have that type of training. But, you know, I obviously became very passionate about it, because as I learned to heal myself, I had a bigger lever to use for all of my clients who were coming to me with similar problems. And you know, it started to branch out from back pain to knee pain, hip pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, because ultimately, many of those aches and pains we all experience are coming from movement related problems. So I learned under his tutelage, helped me really with a whole host of other people, and that was really great. So that’s my, that’s my long, short story.

 

Manon Bolliger  08:31

No it’s fascinating. And I just a lot of people that are listening to this know about Bowen therapy. I don’t know if you are familiar with that, it’s, it’s very similar to osteopathic work, okay, but I would say simpler in the sense that there’s less you still have to decide what to do for your your patient or your client. But it’s, it’s based a little bit more on the understanding that the body resets itself once you give a certain information working with the nervous system. So so it’s very interesting, because a lot of us, and I’ve been doing this for years, practicing this, and I run a college that teaches Bowen therapy. So this

 

Amanda Harris  09:23

now I’m making the connections

 

Manon Bolliger  09:24

right up my alley. Awesome, very interesting. But often, you know, we get we’re in a system medically where doctors are not really trained to understand what’s wrong with the body. And then, at least in Canada, they send them to physiotherapists. And physiotherapists are just, I mean, not just, I don’t mean it condescendingly, but they are focused on the muscle, building up the muscle, but if you haven’t dealt with the trauma or. System like you would waste, like, two years building a muscle that the nervous system hasn’t said, I’m ready to take that on, right? So, exactly, yeah. So I’ve been looking, you know, and the shortcomings of what we do, I would say, is that we reset the body, and it doesn’t take long. It takes three to five sessions. But then I feel that it’s important to have, like whole body movement understanding, so that you can restrengthen but not from this, like single muscular approach. It’s like whole body movement, and I haven’t yet found the the right absolute like, I’m in love with this. You know, we need to work collaboratively, because some patients, they don’t seem to need anything else. But I, I’ve been looking for those that do, because it’s like, what do you do next anyway? So I just want to give you that context. But let’s go.

 

Amanda Harris  11:01

Oh, that’s that is super I love that. I’m so excited to hear you say that, Manon, because I find that same shortcoming here in the States, where there are people, and we’ve got some, you know, physical therapy is, is an interesting field, because there are physical therapists, and then there are physical therapists, you know, like there are people that sort of are going through the motions, and they’re going through the algorithm. And then there are people who really take a whole look at the body, and they start problem solving, and they can be quite genius at that, and they get pretty darn close to what I do. And those are sort of few and far between, at least in my network. The others are, you can find them a dime a dozen down the road, right, like the ones that you know, hot pack, cold pack put you on a bike for a few minutes, all that. So, so it’s very interesting, the results that they get, and what I hear a lot from the people that find me, because I’m one of those last resort people, which is what my mentor was to, the osteopathic physician. It was like, that was the guy you went to when nothing else worked. And I think, as he is retired, I can’t say that I’m anywhere close to his genius, but I find that a lot of my clients are like, this is my Hail Mary. This is my last try before I just give up and give into the pain. And it breaks my heart to hear that, because it means they’ve already been through a whole series of things that didn’t work, and often it is exactly what you describe, where they’ve got a movement problem, and the nervous system is jacked up because, of course, by the time they get to me, they’ve been in pain for so long, they’ve been in fight or flight. You know, their system is so jacked up, like not just their musculoskeletal system, but their nervous system is really jacked up. A lot of times they are activity avoidant, like they are. They are very apprehensive about doing any types of movement or certain types of movement. Anyway, sometimes it’s any type of movement. And so, you know, what they described to me is that sort of targeted, I think it was like an old school physical therapy approach of, oh, you know, you’ve got pain in your back. We’re just going to put blinders on and look right here at where your back hurts, and we’re not going to think about the rest of the system and and that becomes very problematic. And so one of the things that the physician that I worked with for so many years left me with was the blueprint for, if not the self corrections themselves, like how to teach people how to get out of some of the myofascial binds and myofascial snits that, you know, our people find themselves in, and they’re very generalized, and I don’t touch them. I’m not the one doing it. I instruct them through the movement patterns, and they can free themselves. And that tends to really work well, you know, and then once we get the mechanics back online, sometimes they reset automatically, right? And that, that was what this particular physician found as he started working with me, you know, he told me the the whole theory behind osteopathic manual therapy was, as soon as we get neutral mechanics restored, the nervous system resets, and they’ve got access to all the muscles that were once either diminished or offline completely, right? That’s the whole idea. But he started realizing that there was a, there was a section of his patients that weren’t spontaneously resetting, and they needed more they needed either some soft tissue therapy. They needed some mobilization, or they needed some, you know, stability training, or something. They needed something else to get movement back online properly. And so as he started working with me, and our trust started to really build, he just started, I mean, like, just pipelining me clients. Because he was like, I’ll reset the hardware. You fix the software was, it was sort of the joke that we had, you know, and, and so we did that as a team for many years. And, and so that’s really the clientele that I get now. Are the people who they they realize through one way or another, and often they come in and they tell me, it’s an instinct, you know, they’ll say, they’ll say, I’ve heard about you or I was told to come. See you. And I gotta tell you, this is gonna sound really weird, and I love it when they say that. It’s like, oh, Try me. I like, just, just try me. And they’ll say, you know, I really think, I mean, this was one of my favorites. I really think that even though I’ve got Caf pain in both legs, I think it could be coming from somewhere else, like, maybe my back. Like, great, let’s take a look, you know. And they look at me. They’re like, really, like, you don’t think I’m nuts, because it sounds a little far fetched to me. And I’m like, nope, sounds perfectly reasonable to me. And so we look, you know, and we see if we can make things better by by getting them to move better. But yeah, I have the exact same

 

Manon Bolliger  15:39

Yeah. So, so like, because our, I mean, there are people watching that are not familiar with some of the you know, medical language, but there are others that are so maybe, because you have a unique story of yourself, you know, your own path, could you explain what was wrong and feel free to put the right medical terms in it, so that. And then once you tried that, and once again, I, for me, the goal of this is not to say, oh, because acupuncture didn’t work for you. Acupuncture is not good. That’s not the point here.

 

Amanda Harris  16:15

No, I mean, everything works for somebody, right? Exactly, exactly, so,

 

Manon Bolliger  16:19

but it’s more to understand the journey and then explain. What’s the what is it that you did differently so that you know, because we may not find one of you somewhere else, right, or you know, or an osteopath who’s conscious of this at that level or so, what is the, yeah, what’s this sort of science, in a sense, behind this that you could explain, that would be really fascinating, absolutely.

 

Amanda Harris  16:53

So I’m going to try not to be too long winded about this, but I want to connect the dots for your audience. Because I think unless I to your point, unless I explain what happened with my injury, you’re going to be at a loss to understand why the path I took actually worked, because it was after many years of trying and failing, a whole lot of other stuff. So basically, the nature of my injury, well, the mechanism of injury was I had a horse that pulled a wall down on me, a barn wall down on me. It was a very heavy oak wall with iron fittings all over it, like stall fronts and things. And it was, it’s sort of a miracle. I survived, because I was running from the wall. Once the wall started coming down. Horse was fine, by the way, everybody always wonders. Was a horse? Okay? Horse was fine. He’s just, you know, made he almost killed me, but he was fine, but pulled the wall down on me, and the wall, as I was running from it landed on my back and made me face plant, like I went face down on the ground, and the top of the wall was across my shoulder blades, so my head and shoulders were sticking out, and the wall was covering the rest of me. And I thought I was by myself, but a young woman was in the barn. Apparently, she had driven up while all the craziness was going on, and she was probably about my size too, like she’s probably five, five and 125 pounds or something. So this is one of those superhuman things you hear about. She grabbed me from under the shoulders and pulled me free of the wall. Wow. Okay, you can imagine like, as she’s pulling my whole body’s being tractioned Right, like it’s being stretched and contorted as she’s dragging me out from under this wall. Now I hold no ill will toward her. I am so grateful to her for saving my life, because that could have been a whole lot worse than it was, but when that happened, it apparently tore a really important ligament that connects the back of my pelvis to my spine, my lower back. So there’s this big, thick ligament down there that just keeps everything kind of moving, but also under control between, you know, essentially for me, the left side of my pelvis and my left lower back. So with that ligament pretty well blown, I have a chronic instability, which means that I’ve got too much play back there, right? Those Those areas are moving freely and they shouldn’t be, because that ligament is is forever over stretched. So I didn’t understand that at the time when that happened to me, I didn’t realize that was the injury, and nobody told me that was the injury, until many, many years later, when with my other osteopathic physician, we kind of took a look back and started talking about the mechanism of injury, and we started to understand what happened and how it happened, the

 

Manon Bolliger  19:37

lumbosacral ligament that’s on lumbar ligament failure, lumbar Okay, okay,

 

Amanda Harris  19:44

yeah so once we understood that that was really what happened, we started to kind of work backwards and understand why my body was doing what it was doing. So with that much instability in the system, you know, there are these little positional sensors in and around. Challenge, pretty much every motion segment in your in your body, like your motion segments of your spine and every joint and those motion those positional sensors, are constantly reporting to the brain about whether an area is relatively neutral and copacetic or not.

 

Commercial Break  20:14

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Amanda Harris  21:16

you. Yeah, and so when I would get a little, let’s say too unstable back there, I was moving too much back there. And let’s say I was doing squats or lunges or something, maybe in an aerobics class, and there was too much playback there, my nervous system would get that warning from the positional sensor that this area was out of balance or out of position. And then my brain would or my spinal cord would send signals to my body to tighten certain muscles, like clamp down, you know, protect this area, clamp down, and if I continued to do things so it might have started in an aerobics class where certain muscles were starting to get tighter and tighter and tighter. And you know what you do when you feel your muscles are tight, you stretch them because you don’t realize they’re trying to protect you. So you stretch them, and then you might start doing other things, and usually by the third or fourth insult that I gave that area, not realizing that that’s what I was doing. But you know, let’s say I took an aerobics class and I did heavy squats or lunges or something. And then maybe I, maybe I rode a horse. And then maybe by the end of the evening, I needed to feed the cat. And so I would grab a handful of cat food, and I would innocently bend over to feed the cat, and then my whole system would go into terrific spasm. So what I’m saying to your audience is, you know, my brain and spinal cord were trying to make up for the imbalance back there and all the extra movement. And you know, they would, they would, they would tighten down muscles for me to try to protect me. But I kept going. And every time I kept doing stuff that was irritating that area, more muscles were cranking down and cranking down until the final straw, which was usually something terribly innocent. You know, it might even be me trying to pull off one shoe using my other foot right now, pulling on her foot. You know, it’s something pretty innocent. Usually, that was the last straw. And I would go into this horrific spasm loop. And so what I what I was trying to discover, was, how do I prevent that? And that’s what I couldn’t figure out, because people kept saying, just get stronger. And so I would get dim, and I would work out to get stronger. But you can kind of see how that might start that whole loop again, right? So I couldn’t understand

 

Manon Bolliger  23:52

Yeah, or stretch more, which also cause problems, because then you know the reflex is that the the joint is going to actually calcify more and more, you know, because it’s, it’s there to protect you, so you’re just triggering protection. Yeah,

 

Amanda Harris  24:10

yes, and, and those muscles that were gripping, you know, if they weren’t released, to your point, you know, you’re saying calcify. I would say even earlier than that, you know, they’re not getting enough blood flow oxygen, so they’re getting stiffer and tighter and harder. And so you know what you do when that happens? You go to a massage therapist, and you get a great massage, and she gets in there with her elbow, and she releases everything, and then later on that evening, you fall like a house of cards. At least that’s what happened to me, yeah, lots of clients tell me the same story. You know, I went to get a massage, and then later on that evening, something happened, and I wound up in the emergency room because I couldn’t stand up. So so those that that was my story now that that was a pretty violent thing, you know, most of the clients I see don’t have that level of dysfunction, but they. Have something a lot lower level, but I don’t want to, I mean, I don’t want my worst enemy to ever go through that kind of pain. It was terrible, but I had to learn was number one, I had to figure out that there were places in my body. Well, number one, we had to figure out how to keep me neutral, right? And that’s what the Osteopath did, and that’s what the Bowen therapy sounds like. It does. It really gets you back into that ground zero mechanics, where you’re in good neutral mechanics. And that’s really important, because if you’re twisted up because something’s gripping too hard, no kind of therapy that you do is going to improve that, like no muscle strengthening is going to improve that, it’s just going to make you more twisted up, correct? So that was the first thing I had to learn. Understand that at first, you know, because people kept saying, Go strengthen. And so I was trying to put strength on a body that was terribly out of balance. But I didn’t understand that at first. See, I didn’t, I didn’t understand that. So first we have to bring things back into balance. And then the next thing that I learned, and a lot of this, was not just nervous system training. It was like trial and error. Was I had stiff places in my body too. And when you’re very stiff in certain places, then if you need more motion, your nervous system goes, Oh, well, I’ve got a lot of motion right here. I’ll just move at that, at that lower back and pelvis juncture, right? So if I had tight hips, which I did, you know, coming out of graduate school and sitting a lot and writing papers and all that stuff, even though I was working out, I mean, I wasn’t great at stretching my hips. If I have tight hips and I’m trying to do something like step over a low fence, you know, swing my leg up and over something. And so guess where I’m moving from? I’m not moving from my hip. I’m moving from that place in my back. So, so part of what I had to learn was, where are my stiff places, and how can I get more motion out of them and less motion out of my vulnerable place, and so mobility work became a very important part of this. But it wasn’t like shotgun mobility work. It wasn’t like, just go take a yoga class. Because I tried that. I tried that because somebody said, go take yoga. You know, like you got a bad back to go take yoga. And it’s a very innocent sounding thing. Actually, I don’t know if you hear that in Canada, but I hear it a lot from physicians here in the States. People come in and they’re almost in tears because, and I call them my yoga refugees. Yoga is a wonderful method, but it is not a cure all for back pain. And unfortunately, there are so many well meaning and well intentioned physicians that will say, Oh, you got a bad back go take yoga and it’s like, it’s not really a great idea. So what we’re talking about here is not sort of shotgun generalized mobility. It’s very specific mobility based on your body and where your body needs more motion. But then together with that, we have to learn to regain control of those places where we’re vulnerable. So for me, it was my that place between my lower back and pelvis on the left side. So while I was trying to free my hips and a few other places, I was also working to regain control over that area that was really vulnerable. So that was a major, a major leap in my if you want to call it therapy, you know, I don’t do therapy because I’m an exercise physiologist, but in the retraining of my movement patterns, because I had to learn how to not just do exercise squats and lunges and push ups and things like that, without tripping all those alarms in my body, I had to be able to throw my leg over a horse, which is tricky when you think about where that instability is, I be able to, you know, feed my animals, bend down and feed the cat, you know, feed the dog. I had to carry bags of dog food. You know, there were certain activities in my life that were going to challenge both the mobility that I needed in my hips and in my upper back and other areas, and the stability the control I needed in my back. And so that those two things kind of went hand in hand early on, and then what I learned was once, I can regain mobility in my stiffest areas and control of my most vulnerable areas. Now I need to train strength, because when you add strength to healthy movement patterns, good mobility and good control, now you have what I’ve learned to call durability. You’ve got durability, which means you can do more stuff longer with less repercussion, and you’ve also got resilience, which means if you screw it up and you don’t move exactly right, your body kind of forgives you, and you don’t necessarily go into one of those horrible like things that I described earlier,

 

Manon Bolliger  29:55

yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that makes so much sense. And. And, yeah, it’s, this is the thing is breaking down, what is, what needs to heal in, in what order, you know, yes, and I think, you know, we, we’ve trusted people in the field, or, you know, in health, usually the white coat syndrome, that they would understand all this. And it’s, it’s actually, it’s a huge field, right in and of itself. So it’s really, I think that’s why, when clients or patients become familiar with the different components of how their body works, then they can go, Okay, this makes more sense. You know, like a lot of people say, you know, well, I don’t know, I do, I do yoga classes, but I’m, I’m always in pain. It’s like, okay, well, then do you think maybe Yoga is not the solution, or maybe they’re

 

Amanda Harris  30:54

so scared to quit because they’re afraid they’re going to lose ground? And I feel that too, like I totally remember that feeling of, I’m so scared, I don’t want to get weak, or I don’t want to get stiff again. You know

 

Manon Bolliger  31:07

exactly, it feels good. So they feel they’ve relaxed, and then it’s like, you know, the next day or whatever.

 

Amanda Harris  31:16

It’s even an hour later, yeah, an hour later, I hear a lot, yeah. I also have had over the years, and do right now, have clients that are physical therapists and physicians that come to me and trust me with their care, because they realize their education never had this in it. And you know, in the beginning, I remember when I first got my first physician client, I was so flattered, like I was, in a way, it was like, You’re trusting me. And that particular physician looked at me and said, Absolutely, you’re an expert in this, right? Like, I’m an expert. There was a, it was an OB GYN, it was my OB GYN. But he was like, I’m an expert in women’s health, but you’re the one that can fix my back. And I was like, Okay. And he even said, he said, we got, we got almost no education in this kind of thing, in medical school, like he said, I don’t even know where to begin. And he loved the work like he loved it. It made so much sense to him, you know. And since then, I’ve had many more physicians and physical therapists, even as clients. And I, I’ve never gotten over the gratitude for professionals like that to be able to let their guard down and come in and see someone who’s a non licensed, you know, Allied medical professional for this kind of work, but it works, and appreciate that,

 

Manon Bolliger  32:38

yeah, and I think this is where we’re heading, in this, you know, iteration of society is greater transparency and also just recognizing, you know, let’s say, like, you know, doctors might have four hours or 11 hours. It varies. You know, of nutrition, that’s not where one goes. Then for understanding that, right? It’s like we need to, we need to know, you know, and so many doctors that have come see me, see me, they feel like they’re drug peddlers, is what they call themselves.

 

Amanda Harris  33:14

I’ve heard the same thing. I’ve heard the same thing. All I know to do is to, is to write a prescription for it,

 

Manon Bolliger  33:19

yeah, and, that’s, you know, I think that’s really sad, you know, when, when I had two students that came from, gosh, was it Thailand? Oh, I’m sorry. I, I am not sure if it’s Thailand or Korea. I Okay, it doesn’t matter. The point is, in their country, one Chinese medical doctor, and the other one was a, like an allopathic medical doctor. And, you know, it was incredible. They both took the the training, the bone training, because they wanted to, you know, bring that back to their country and and teach this. But it was, I had never seen such a thing because the the acupuncture and the medical the Chinese medical doctor was the sister that was seen as the one with all the knowledge, and the other one felt like she had, you know, she knew how to diagnose, but she really didn’t know how to help people. That was her belief or understanding, you know? And I mean, I’m not saying that that’s got to be the truth, but the point is, it’s a refreshing other way when we just become more honest about, where did we focus our energy? What do we know? What’s our domain? And from that, yeah, we can have a discussion, right? It’s not our title that gives us all of that, you know, and I think that’s, I think that’s very exciting, that it’s changing, and people are actually wanting to know. So, yeah, I think, anyway, that’s my, my. Yeah,

 

Amanda Harris  35:01

and I think, I think people are also starting to take responsibility for their health more than they did even 10 years ago. And some are even starting to question. You know, I have family members that work in the medical field, and they never question, and it always, it frustrates me to know when and my husband will even say, Why don’t you say something? And it’s, it’s actually his side of family, but he’ll say, Why don’t you say something about how you know this particular condition, rheumatoid arthritis, you can, you can actually do a lot with nutrition to help, you know, kind of quell some of the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. And I mentioned it to this family member when he was first diagnosed, and he said, No, no, you don’t understand. Like I work in the medical community, I know what’s going on. I do what my doctor says. I go, I go get my infusions, and then I go on about my life, right? And I thought, man, you know. And then my husband will say, you know, why don’t you nudge them again, nope, nope, because that’s leading a horse to water that doesn’t want to drink. Exactly. Not interested. And it’s just interesting, because there were several members of the family like that that I’ve I’ve tried to offer a little insight to, and they’re like, nope, the doctor knows what they’re doing. I’m just going to my doctor. I’m only listening to them. I’m not interested in your opinion. And I’ll say, okay, yep, no

 

Manon Bolliger  36:21

problem. I definitely have that with part parts of my family. The other parts are like, have been sort of brought up with my thinking. So it’s different, but others, it’s like, and it’s amazing, even if they’re brought up a certain way, the impact of our society that trusts the white coat syndrome that uses the fear that propagates information on our television. You know, it’s like we kind of, we get brainwashed, and then we don’t actually critically think or question or then it gets even more complicated, because, you know, it’s become so complicated now that the truth is not easy to come out, unless we actually change fundamentally how you know, who owns the information and and transparency, you know, and but I think we’re coming to the most exciting age in in health, healthcare. So I’m super excited at the changes, you know, and sounds like you started also years ago, you know, we were much more voodoo weird at that time

 

Amanda Harris  37:31

Oh, you know, I was laughing this morning because I had a friend, a very dear friend, who actually started out as a client of mine, and she was referring actually, one of her friends, who’s a physician, to me, and so she sent this text, and she texted both of us, and she said, I want you to meet Amanda. She’s a back whisperer. And I thought, wow, I kind of like that. I’ve never heard that one before, but you know what? I used to get called a lot when I first opened my business in 2013 by by some of my newer clients, was they would call me The White Witch, right? And it was running joke, you know, my husband would say, Oh, my wife’s a witch. And I would say, oh, but only good magic, never bad magic, you know. And so we had this sort of running joke among friends that I was this, you know, white magic witch. But anyway, it’s now, I’m a back whisperer. I’ll take that. I think that’s people can wrap their heads around that better.

 

Manon Bolliger  38:29

Anyway, our time is up. But I think this, this was a very interesting discussion. And, you know, really highlight all the nuances, not all, but some of the nuances that you know one should consider when we have back pain and especially, never give up

 

Amanda Harris  38:48

exactly. Never give up Absolutely.

 

Manon Bolliger  38:50

All right. Well, thank you very much. Thank

 

Amanda Harris  38:54

you, Manon, it was great having having the interview and meeting you

 

Manon Bolliger  38:58

many points to share with our discussion with Amanda Harris is, yeah, how sometimes, like an ideal complimentary method, could really give people who don’t complete their journey, or don’t reinforce their journey, or maybe need a reminder about how to move their body to avoid other injuries could benefit. So this is exciting. It’s our first interview, so we will see. But what we’re going to do is discuss. You know more I’m I’ll find out a little bit more what she offers, what she has for the public, so that they can learn themselves, the what they can do for themselves. And then, you know, I also have for the public moves. But in Bowen, you do. To another. It’s not done to like you can’t do it to yourself. So that’s the community aspect of Bowen. But you know, a lot of families use it this way. So we’re going to see if there’s something that helps moves the needle a little bit more. And then the other thing that’s really important is who tells you about whom, right? Who has the knowledge to make that call? And a lot of people tend to believe people in, you know, white coats. I’m not just picking on them, but that’s kind of how we’ve been raised in society, and they may not know about any of this so really important. You don’t go to a butcher to ask about your how to cook your vegetables right. You gotta go to the right people.

 

ENDING: 

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* De-Registered, revoked & retired naturopathic physician, after 30 years of practice in healthcare. Now resourceful & resolved to share with you all the tools to take care of your health & vitality!