The Coccyx And It’s Relation To Pain, Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia – A Case Study

Recently I had the opportunity to observe a miracle in a 38 year old female.  Her chief complaint was pain all over her body.  It had been with her since she was 5 years old.  She had a very hard time remembering any significant period of time without it.  The patient came to me after seeing a wide range of practitioners;  every sort of MD, PT, chiropractor, massage therapist, etc. with no lasting relief from her symptoms.

I made a mental note, as I do with any patient who comes in after seeing other medical professionals, to do something different.  So I took a detailed history, looking for something that had been missed along the way.  She had three children – two via C-section and one traumatic vaginal delivery.  There was a history of an MVA many years ago.  Her menstrual cycles were irregular (her last child was conceived after “early menopause”) – this suggested to me a hormonal component.  She had dyspareunia, lack of energy, and had gotten, at best, 2 hours of sleep per night for the last nine years due to pain waking her from slumber.

I have learned, with the help of Jean-Pierre Barral, D. O., Ken Lossing, D.O., and Paul Hume, N.D., D.O. from New Zealand, to look at the sacrum and coccyx in cases of low energy.  I asked questions about any hard falls or slips that could have contributed.  In fact, she had a few hard falls and had at least one fracture of her coccyx.  I had learned that a sacral fracture typically would cause low energy and cold hands and feet (patient’s sensation) as related symptoms.  As a student doing my endocrinology rotation, I was able to work with many fibromyalgia patients and found that their symptoms coincide with coccygeal injury.  This patient displayed both of these types of injuries to some degree.

I did two different types of screening on the patient.  The first was the Ed Stiles, D.O. structural screen and the second was Barral’s global listening.  Both took me to the pelvis and further refinement took me to the coccyx.  When I usually find this type of dysfunction I treat it externally, but that treatment felt “off” to my intuition.  It felt like the more traditional Still internal release was called for.  I explained to the patient what I had found and what I would like to do to treat it.  She agreed and a nurse joined us to observe the treatment.

After treating her coccyx using indirect unwinding, I rescreened using thermal diagnosis (Barral) and found not one, but two sacral fractures.  I had never seen two fractures on the same person before, but since each one can reduce the feeling of having enough energy, it made some sense.  I treated each of these indirectly and then finished the treatment with a CV4 to balance the cranial mechanism.  During the short CV4, I noticed a great deal of change taking place within the head and pelvis.  That ended the first day’s treatment.  I instructed the patient to follow up in one week.

The patient was beaming at the next visit.  She had experienced two days completely pain free!  She slept 8 hours the first night and 9 hours the next.  She looked like an entirely different woman.  All was well until she was playing with her daughter on the third day post treatment and felt a “pop” in her lower back and the pain began to return.  I was certainly encouraged by her outcome from just one visit.  I saw her for a third visit, before this writing, and she is doing much better. With each visit there are improvements. She is sleeping 5-6 hours per night consistently, her dyspareunia is gone, her energy is much better and she went dancing, for the first time in years, at a friend’s wedding last week.

The “magic” of osteopathy has returned this patient to a life that she assumed was impossible to achieve.  It was an honor to be a part of her healing process and continue to apply what I have learned along the way.