By Josef DellaGrotte Ph.D.

What do you do when a mother calls about her 15-year-old daughter who has a scoliosis now advanced to 47 degrees?

That sets off medical alarms and indeed the medicos have requested the mother to consider surgery. What kind? A radical, life-altering surgery involving attaching a Harrington rod to the spine with turn-screws.

They have already tried physical therapy, and everything else yet nothing has worked to reverse the slow creep of the scoliosis.

How can this be helped? First, it takes a different approach, one that looks at the scoliosis as an idiopathic disordered response to growth, and look further, into an existing postural disorder not even mentioned by any of the therapists. If the body is already out of its core supported integration, the shoulders rolled forward, the scoliosis has a field day. What I am looking at in this 15 year old is an un-integrated body, disconnected to herself.... yet it takes only six sessions before she gets reconnected using the six pathways. At first, she does not understand but does the exercises and lessons. Then she starts to figure it out. She can follow the paths of levering, and transmission through joints. Session six finds her scoliosis so reduced that her parents note the very observable difference.

We are now preparing her for the final test: the x-rays. Once she drops below the critical point, they will have no basis for their surgery. She will be free of inner terror. She was referred because they heard of the possibilities of an alternative method, in this case, Feldenkrais.