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About 15 years ago, at a conference on effects of head injuries, a mutual friend introduced me to John, a personal injury attorney.
We were sitting around and talking in his hotel room when our friend mentioned that John had a chronic knee problem and asked if I would take a look at it. I usually don't see someone under such circumstances, but hey, what chiropractor would refuse an opportunity to impress a personal injury lawyer?
John had been a runner but said he had given it up a number of years back because of knee pain. He had done some physical therapy but was still having the pain. Whenever there is musculoskeletal pain, it is certain that some of the muscles in and around the painful area will be weak when tested. This is a condition known as muscle inhibition. Though this is probably known to most physical medicine practitioners, and studied for over 100 years (including a whole chapter in an 1886 neurology text), muscle inhibition is not included among the 70,000 "official" diagnoses that all physicians must use to classify our patients’ condition. Why this is the case is a medical mystery in itself.
Beyond that however, in the mainstream medical literature, there is no known treatment for inhibition. Even intensive physical therapy and exercises will fail to create a permanent correction. If you go to an orthopedist or PT then, they won’t be able to correct your muscles, because, to put it bluntly, once your muscles are inhibited they are not expected to return to normal … ever! Most mainstream practitioners do not test for or discuss the condition.
The good news is that practitioners of the chiropractic sub-specialty of Applied Kinesiology (AK) have been successfully reversing muscle inhibition since the 1960s, though for a number of reasons, likely including the fact that chiropractic has been actively suppressed for much of that time, and these methods are likely to not be covered by insurance, and you are unlikely to get a referral to someone who might actually correct your muscles.
I am one of about 100 practitioners who are certified in the system called Advanced Muscle Integration Technique or AMIT, an offshoot of AK that tests and corrects over 300 muscles on each side of the body. In AMIT, which was used for over 20 years in the NBA with unparalleled results, it takes about 10 minutes to correct each muscle. Most AK practitioners work with only about a hundred muscles. While the number can vary widely, in my experience, testing will show that 25 to 50% of muscles in painful areas are weak.
But I have found an even faster and more efficient way to reboot muscles as I call it. It is so fast and easy, that, to get back to the story, it is possible to reboot all the weak muscles in a particular area of the body in minutes, even in a hotel room without any equipment. A peer-reviewed study I did showed that over 90% of weak-testing muscles can be normalized in seconds. In my office, using the Muscle ReBoot method, that goes up to over 99%. Just getting the muscles working again will often eliminate a good portion of musculoskeletal pain in a generally healthy person with no complicating issues. John appeared to be such a person.
To be honest, Muscle ReBooting is so quick and reliable that, I admit, I love to show it off.
The knee
The knee is one of the easiest areas to work on, in my experience. Unlike the shoulder, for instance, which has over 40 independent muscles or (divisions of muscles) that must work in concert to perform movements over a wide arc, the knee has just over 20, and its range of motion is limited. The knee is under the primary control of the hamstrings, which flex or bend the knee, and quadriceps which extend it. When the knee is bent, rotation is allowed as the medial and lateral hamstrings and popliteus, a small muscle at the back of the knee, contract. The two gastrocnemius muscles and the plantaris connect the lower femur to the back of the foot, and also therefore assist in flexion of the knee.
The quadriceps are sometimes considered one muscle, because it has four origins at the top of the thigh and hip, but those divisions come together into one insertion into the tibia below the knee. Nonetheless, in AMIT, there are 13 separate muscle divisions that we test. Likewise, there are 6 hamstring tests, though there are only 4 named muscles.
Because the balance of the foot and hip will affect the knee, when treating knee problems, I like to also work with those muscles as well. But since in this demonstration, I just did a few of the knee muscles.
What is true for any joint in the body is that, if even one of its muscles is inhibited due to an injury or for other reasons, other muscles will have to compensate. This is, by definition, muscle imbalance, which leads to more stress on the remaining muscles in addition to ligament, and joint imbalance. These imbalances lead to further injuries and osteoarthritis. In the knee, for instance, some muscles connect directly into the meniscus, the floating cartilage disks in the knee. They are responsible for moving the meniscus into the proper position through the range of motion, so a single inhibited muscle can be a risk factor for blowing out a meniscus.
Using Muscle ReBooting, it is usually possible to correct many muscles at the same time, often using a single simple treatment. The correction might be a chiropractic adjustment, rubbing an acupuncture point or working on a particular muscle, perhaps not even one that we are trying to target. Sometimes though, the correction is more involved, perhaps requiring us to address habitual postural faults, chronic emotional stress or even, at times, internal organ stress.
In all cases, though, the proof of efficacy is easily obtained by retesting the muscles. Either they have been corrected, and now test strong, or they do not. I don’t recall which of John’s muscles were weak, but in less than 5 minutes, we had strengthened all of them.
As he later reported to me, in one of the visits where he brought his kids in for treatment of one problem or another, his knee pain was gone, and has apparently not returned since.
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