Dr. Francis Murphy – Unfrozen

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Carl Boodram: One on the issues that I’m having has been, other than getting out of bed and changing my clothes is that if I want to move around the house and put on a light, like in this case, if I wanna put on this light switch, I have to go like this and it’s pain but I’ll be able to move it once I get there and then I’ll have to assist my hand to bring it back down.

In October of ’09 I was in the process of going downtown to come back up and take my daughter to lunch and it was raining terribly hard and I hit a hydroplane and by doing so my car shifted to the center of the meridian and flipped it about five times and they found me in the back seat.

My neck was broken, face was fractured.

Apparently I was in a coma for four weeks as a result of that I end up with a rotary cough damages on both hands where I couldn’t use my hand to full extent.

Dr. Francis Murphy: You were diagnosed with a frozen shoulder.

Carl Boodram: Yes.

Dr. Francis Murphy: Okay and you are unable to bring your arm up?

Carl Boodram: Absolutely.

Dr. Francis Murphy: You’ve lost a lot of the function of your shoulder.

Frozen shoulder is a puzzling condition, people between the ages of 40 and 70 get it.

It’s path is idiopathic which means they don’t know what causes it, it comes on mysteriously. The patient is unable to bring their arm up alongside their head, they only have about 90 to 120 degrees of what we call abduction and almost every frozen shoulder patient complains of not being able to sleep.

Alright so slowly let’s go ahead and abduct the arms, bring them up over your head.

Roland Serna: I haven’t slept in a month, to be honest with you I roll quite a bit, I toss back and forth, I wake up about every hour and a half to two hours.

Dr. Francis Murphy: So bringing it up alongside your ears is very difficult?

Roland Serna: It’s not gonna go.

Dr. Francis Murphy: The conditions been in the literature for about 200 years and nobody’s ever been able to figure out what exactly it is and what causes it.

Carl Boodram: I took therapy for about three months and it didn’t really actually help.

Dr. Francis Murphy: They do physical therapy that makes them worse, that makes them hurt more and sleep less. Also a lot of patients get the injection which is ineffective most of the time, it keeps getting done, but it’s not fixing the problem.

And I thought to myself well it may be a weakening or a malfunction of the spinal accessory nerve and now I have this paradigm that I built in my head that the skull and the spine support a part of the nervous system that runs the shoulder.

Kristin Neely: When he saw me for the first time he’s said “you have a frozen shoulder, I can tell because your head is crooked.” I said, “really?” I didn’t know who this man was and he said, “show me.”

Dr. Francis Murphy: I postulated that, okay, if her skull somehow wasn’t functioning on her first cervical vertebra that that possibly could cause some kinda malfunction in the spinal accessory nerve and if I could reduce that or fix that or get that positioning right again for her, possibly it would affect that nerve and she would get her arm function back.

I stopped, I looked at her and I said “what I thought I would feel, I feel and now I wanna go ahead and reduce this.” She says, “go for it.”

Kristin Neely: I’d never been to a chiropractor before, I didn’t know what to expect, it was something foreign to me but I trusted him and I’m so glad I did.

Dr. Francis Murphy: And go ahead and bring the arms up, see if they’ll come all the way.

Roland Serna: (Raising his arm) You gotta be kidding me.

Dr. Francis Murphy: Yeah, I’m not kidding.

This thing that had been around for so long that people knew nothing about was being resolved with this chiropractic adjustment.

Kristin Neely: People need to know about this, they really do. It’s so simple and so non-invasive, it needs to be out there.

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Jeff Hays