Kim Pearson has good reason to believe in the Bowen Technique. After spending years in agony with an undiagnosed fractured spine, she finally found some relief when a friend suggested she try the method. She was so impressed she trained to practise herself.
‘I fell off a horse and was knocked unconscious,’ Kim explains. ‘Obviously, they were just worried about my head, and didn’t know I’d fractured a bone in my back. But for years afterwards I suffered from incredible back pain. I’d get home from work in the evening and just lie on the floor and cry.
‘I kept going back to my doctor and finally I was referred to a physio who x-rayed my back and said “Oh yes, you’ve had a bad fracture there”.’
This was four years after the accident and although the fracture itself had healed, the ongoing damage to the soft tissue remained. ‘They tried physio on me, but nothing worked,’ Kim recalls, ‘then a friend of mine who was training in the Bowen Technique suggested I try it. She referred me to someone in the area, and it was amazing. It took three or four treatments to start with, then a top up every few months for a while. It got rid of my pain completely.’
So how does it actually work, I wonder. ‘It’s gentle, very precise rolling moves over the soft tissue,’ Kim explains. ‘It works by resetting the body to heal itself – it’s like sending a vibration through the muscle and the muscle then vibrates back and carries on working, and readjusting and realigning.’
I’m more than a little sceptical but I tell Kim about the nagging stress ache in my right shoulder and arm, and about the weakness in my right knee which means I’ve gone from regularly running half marathon distances to just about being able to cover two and a half miles and she begins the treatment.
It’s not like any kind of massage I’ve had before. Kim works a tiny, rolling motion into the muscle on each side of the body, then you’re left alone to give the move chance to work for two minutes. Then she comes back and makes the next move. It all feels a bit disjointed and strange.
When done, Kim gives me strict instructions, the most important of which is I’m not allowed to have hot showers or baths for a week after treatment – this is because the muscles are, apparently, still working to heal themselves and very hot water will inhibit this process.
My scepticism lasts until the next morning, when, in my lukewarm shower, I go to scrub the back of my left shoulder and find I can reach right around without any pain in my arm. I can’t believe it and stand there reaching behind myself again and again. There’s just the slightest twinge.
A week later (you mustn’t take vigorous exercise for a week either) I go for a run and, 50 minutes and four miles later, get home with barely a murmur from my knee. The next morning I phone Kim and book another appointment.
I still don’t really understand how the technique works, but I can tell you that for me, it did. And I’m not alone. ‘I’ve had some great success stories,’ Kim says. ‘I treated a very elderly lady in her 80s who used to be a dance teacher. She was using a stick, she couldn’t dance any more – in fact, she found it difficult just to walk upstairs. When she came to see me the second time, she’d got rid of her stick, was running up the stairs and was dancing again!’
Kim qualified as a practitioner with the Bowen Technique Academy of Australia in 2003 and is a member of the Bowen Association UK and has been accepted as a member of the NHS Directory of Complementary & Alternative Practitioners.
Kim practises at The Cambridge Complementary Health Centre, 8 Rose Crescent, and can be contacted on 01223 355344.
