ABOUT SAUCON VALLEY ACUPUNCTURE

 Then in his mid-20s he started to get tighter in his body, he started to have low back pain. There’s a thing that happens with your bones as you age they are called Epiphyseal closure for the long bones of the body. It signals the end of the growth of the long bones of the body, what was once soft cartilage as the bone was growing now turns into hard bone. All the torques between the ankles the knees and the hips from the club feet were being set in stone. As that was happening his low back pain got worse and he started to look for other alternatives. He went to Chiropractor‘s. Had a personal trainer. He went to physical therapy. He tried massage therapy even went to faith healers, all kinds of things to for his body to heal. Most of it didn’t work in fact all of it didn’t work so like most people you end up in front of an orthopedic surgeon. He noticed in his body that he lacked support through his left leg. Earlier in his life he had torn his ACL in a skiing accident. It happened 5 years earlier, at this point in his late 20s  they found out that yes your ACL is not attached so they reattached it through an operation, he felt better. Hoping maybe this was the reason for his low back pain. Alas, no he still had low back pain and for two years he couldn’t ski, very unhappy.

​

 As his back pain continues to get worse his orthopedic surgeon says lets give you an MRI. They say you have a bulging disc, I can do laminectomy  surgery and you’ll feel better. He does the surgery. He does not feel any better months after the surgery. Goes back to the orthopedic Surgeon and tells him I don’t feel any better. He says no you should be better you should go back to work. He tries to go back to work still in horrible pain when standing. He tries for less than an hour returns home and lies on his back on his living room floor and feels his disc  re-herniate in his low back.  At this point there isn’t going to be any additional pain because it hasn’t hardened yet, but there was gonna be more pain coming. so at that point, living in Laconia, New Hampshire, decided to drive to Dartmouth Hitchcock, the teaching hospital in the state. Waiting in the emergency room, laying on his back in constant pain. In fact on the drive over there he is in the backseat laying down.  He had another MRI. Yes, your disc is severely herniated, send him home. Sees another orthopedic surgeon. They want to put hardware in his spine and fuse his spine. At this point, he laments to one of his friends and he mentioned Rolfing and explained it a little bit.  Right away he knew! he said yes that’s what I need. He called Kevin Frank anxious to get started.  

​

This was the early 90s there was no Internet. For the past 10 years he would occasionally go to the public library periodicals section and ask them to give him everything they had on low back pain. They would return with a stack of periodicals bookmarked to where the articles on low back were and he would review these articles looking for some type of answer for his low back pain.

 

Kevin didn’t return his call because of some phone mixup for a week or so.  Finally they arranged to get together and it was amazing when he did finally get to his place in Holderness  NH on White Oak Pond. He remembered getting out of the car with a cane and his whole body just felt a wash of energy through it. Similar to a cold shiver but this felt warm, tingly. He started the Rolfing series. The first hour was tough his ribs were very very tight. He didn’t know why. The second week worked on the second hour which was the feet and of course they were very tight. Afterwards his back pain felt worse, way worse but he was determined to work through this and heal himself. 

​

He got through the series and continued to receive treatments after a while from other practitioners and explored other bodywork modalities such as Traeger work, zero balancing, and osteopathic cranial manipulation. Less than a year later, in the fall of 92 he was attending the Rolf Institute, determined to heal his body. He decided to become a Rolfer. 

 

While in Boulder, he continued to explore other healing, modalities, such as Acupuncture and pilates on the reformer.

 

Graduating from the Institute in August 1994 he returned to Pennsylvania and started his new career as a Rolfer. He continued his Pilates instruction with Karen Carlson and started to teach pilates to some of his clients.

 

A major breakthrough in his healing came through a few years later, while attending his first continuing education at a residential retreat in North Carolina.

 

As he was walking to the building, he struck up a conversation with a classmate, and they decided to work together that morning. It was a basic introduction to visceral manipulation. Lucky for him. This classmate had already worked with the French osteopathic Barral, who had yet to publish the book on visceral manipulation. Along with other pioneers in this new mode of manipulation, such as Deater Pratt and Kristof Sommer.

 

In this training, as with most trainings with the Rolf Institute, subjects are viewed in their underwear in order to see clues as to what’s happening beneath the surface of the skin. As he turned in his underwear with his back to the group, the instructor pointed to two dimples below his rib cage, and stated this is a kidney issue. 

 

While on the table his newfound classmate waved the instructor over and said, I can’t find his kidneys. She dug around a bit and said I can’t find them either but if you do find them, they are the lowest kidneys I’ve ever seen.

 

As the classmate continued to dig around, he noticed that he had paused, so he slowly opened his eyes, and the classmate just mouthed the word, kidney, he nodded and went back to closing his eyes, and focusing on relaxing as best as he could.

​

After the treatment when standing in front of the class, and turning his back to them, there were several gasps of astonishment. The dimples were gone! His kidneys were back in their rightful place probably the first time ever since emerging from his mothers womb in the hot summer of 1959. 

 

A flurry of questions from the fellow students in the room. How did you do it? What did it feel like? How do you feel now? The classmate explained; I felt his kidney in the bottom of his pelvis. It started to do a little rocking dance, and then it stopped. Then I knew it was ready, the classmate said it was like pushing a bar of soap between two layers of Jell-O. It would move a few millimeters and then stop again. He would wait, it would do its little dance and stop then he knew it was ready again and he would continue to intend the kidney in its rightful direction up the retro peritoneal cavity where the kidney has its own resting place walled off from the rest of your organs. Apparently the cavity expands to the bottom of your pelvis or at least it did for this gentleman. What was all the wiggling about? Probably loosening all the tubes attached to the kidney. There’s a huge one that comes right from your heart. It’s called the renal artery, not to mention the ureters that go to your bladder. All those had to be loosened and ready for just a few millimeters movement and then wait patiently for the next round of wiggling and movement. The patient said he didn’t feel much during the whole treatment. In fact, he didn’t feel that different right now except the next day he mentioned that he had a funny smell in his pee, and we had a community salad at dinner that night that had asparagus and someone said oh that’s just the asparagus. Well that was the first time he had ever smelled asparagus pee because his kidneys were not functioning optimally to filter it out but now they were. 

 

Looking back on that moment, he realized that was one of the huge turnarounds in his low back pain. In the coming months he would feel stronger and more capable, able to lift heavier things without issue, feeling like a real person without disability.

 

It wasn’t until almost a decade later that he made the connection while in Acupuncture school learning about the kidney channel. This channel starts at the base of your foot and then wraps around the inside of your ankle and then continues It’s way up the leg into the groin and connects with the kidneys. From there, it continues up the chest and connects to the lung where it ends at kidney 27 where the clavicle‘s meet the sternum. 

 

By imposing a series of casts to straighten out the legs of the young infant, pulled his kidneys into his pelvis and set him up for low back pain, knee pain, and compromised his lungs. As he was a child growing, he ended up in a oxygen tent with a blue face because Forest Moyer MD said he was “allergic to colds“. So he would have to go back for shots every few months that his sister who is an MD told him we’re probably steroid shots. While also in Acupuncture School he learned that the fourth intercostal space is usually lined up with the nipple. In his body it’s the sixth because his lungs were pulled tight from developing with the casts on his body as an infant. You see, in Oriental medicine one end of the channel affects the other end of the channel so his lungs were compromised. 

​

Later on in his life, he became an expert Mountain Biker racing cross country often times achieving podium in the sport class. He was in his early 50s a few years later, while climbing on the bike up the hills he noticed that he would suddenly be out of breath, feel like he was strangulating to breathe and need to stop and take anything off that was near or around his neck or his head like his helmet, his glasses, open his shirt, and that would be accompanied with intense head pain. Several scans and tests revealed nothing. Everything seem normal with his heart, his lungs and scans of his head. 

 

While finishing his last year at Acupuncture college at tri State in Manhattan in 2006, he had a visceral treatment from his colleague and teacher, Liz Gaginni. She confirmed that yes his kidneys are still in place. However, she said that his left ureter was tight and that would pull on the inside of his leg and affect his knee. It was true. He had pain in his left knee. He had been going to the so-called masters at school and having them try and treat it by acupuncturists with over 30 years experience. None of them could figure it out. It wasn’t until he graduated and went to a course on motor point work that he fixed himself by finding out that he had bursitis in his left knee , more specifically the Pezz anserine bursa, basically motor point can relieve tension in muscles by stimulating them with a single hertz electro Acupuncture treatment. It feels like a heartbeat in your muscle. This resets the tension with that muscle and its antagonist so if you would release your tricep your bicep would also have to be reset, that’s how we are wired.  The three main muscle groups that affect that bursa were the medial hamstrings the gracilis and the sartorius, all of them were tight, and once he released those muscles with motor point, his bursa pain went away immediately. Fascinated with the power of this newfound skill he started to apply motor point techniques with his education in spinal mechanics and the bio mechanics of alignment the latter dealt with the tilts and shifts of the major, girdles, shoulder and pelvic. 

 

It was in the summer of 2006 he was riding a standup JetSki on the Delaware river and would often times take a break at the tip of Whippoorwill Island. He would stop and entertain himself by reading some thing he brought along with him, there were no smart phones as of yet, so often times he would bring the Rolf Institute publication, Rolf lines and read some of the articles. It was there that he read an article from a rolfer/chiropractor, titled the inhibition of inhibition. In that article, because of the unique interface between the two hemispheres of our brains we all have  predisposed tilts in our pelvic girdle’s. Our left pelvic girdle is tilted posteriorly, and our right pelvic girdle is tilted anteriorly……. boom. That was the moment. Like the proverbial lightbulb going off above your head, that was his moment of inspiration, he knew he had read earlier, in Greenmans tomb that the osteopath had mentioned that which ever pelvic or shoulder girdle is posteriorly tilted that the vertebrae are best rotating away from that posterior tilt……. boom. He immediately started to palpate his own body. Yes, it was true. His left pelvis was tilted back, and his right one was tilted forward. Having learned earlier in his course with Liz Gaginni he knew that he couldn’t have any of the girdles tilting and shifting in the same direction, and he saw that his left knee was behind his right knee, and he knew he was in trouble there, he was PP on his left hip posterior tilted posteriorly shifted. He knew one of the main culprits for that was the iliacus muscle and he palpated it and it was very tight…. boom. He then palpated his lumbar spine. It was left rotated….boom. Years earlier he had taken a spinal mechanics course through the Rolf Institute. He knew that he just had to put pressure on the right, spinal groove and back bend and he could straighten out his lumbar spine which he did right there on Whippoorwill Island, he immediately felt relief, his low back feeling looser more open more balanced. He right rotated his lumbar spine for the first time in his life. What a relief. 

​

He had been having trouble with his right shoulder girdle from all the years of working as a rolfer. That’s why he got into Acupuncture school. He palpated his right shoulder. He found out that it was AA; anteriorly tilted, and anteriorly shifted. He surmised that the shoulder girdle would have to be the opposite of the pelvic girdle due to our contralateral gait. He palpated the three muscles responsible for pulling the right shoulder out of alignment. Notably, the pectoralis minor, the triceps, and the teres major….boom. All of them tight, he immediately started to work on them himself manually, releasing the tension through myofascial technique that he had already been doing for well over a decade. In addition, he remembers, rotating his humorous laterally, and bringing his shoulder blade down his back. Then he palpated his neck, it was right, rotated and compressed…..boom. Again knowing spinal mechanics, he started to dig into the left, spinal groove of his cervical spine and back bend and released the compression in his neck right there, and then on Whippoorwill Island. 

​

Elated with his newfound discovery and feeling of freedom in his own body. He thought of Ida Rolf as he was riding his standup JetSki down the Delaware river, and what she said about the human condition; that we are not truly upright, we are on the process of being more upright. He knew he had just put a huge piece of this human puzzle together and this was his clarion call to educate humanity to his newfound discovery.

 

For most of his 40s and 50s he was pain-free living in normal life until later on in his 50s he herniated a disc in his lumbar spine and MRI revealed severe arthritis and degenerative disc disease. That incident left him with some neuropathy going down the outside of his right leg and would create cramping from time to time.

 

Later on in his 50s, he was in a skiing accident involving his right knee. It turns out once you hit 50 you’re supposed to dial back the settings of the tension in the bindings that hold your boot to the ski. These bindings were still set on a stronger binding setting, even though he was in his late 50s. He got tangled up with someone else getting off a lift and instead of falling forward into the person he felt back and compromised his right knee. He was able to ski later that season, but with a brace and again the following year with a brace. It was just as the pandemic was hitting when he came back from Lake Tahoe from a ski trip that he decided to finally get an MRI for the damage in his right knee a few years earlier.

​

The MRI revealed that yes, his ACL ligament had been damaged and torn, but not severed along with a medial collateral ligament, damaged, torn, but not severed and some cartilage damage. As with most people, he was relieving some of the irritation in his knee with a Cortizone shot occasionally, fortunately for him the physician he was working with wasn’t available so he saw another physician who told him that he would be a good candidate for PRP injections that is platelet rich plasma. He had known about this, and was elated to find someone that would do it locally for a fairly reasonable charge, so he set up a series of injections , his knee felt much better and he went skiing in the 21/22 season without a brace for the first time and did some of the best skiing of his life. 

 

Later on in his early 60s, he was out helping a friend put his boat in the Delaware river. It was fine until he took the boat at TopSpeed over the wake of a large boat intended for wakeboarding. The boat became airborne, and when it came down with such a huge amount of force, the whole boat shook and slammed into the water. He knew right away his spine was compromised. That person is no longer his friend. That probably took five or 10 years off is spine and he had to treat it every morning as it would left rotate and compress as he slept. He would attend a local chiropractor‘s office for specialized traction that helped keep him out of trouble, but eventually he worked with a local MD anesthesiologist that worked with Biologics to help with degenerative spines utilizing platelet rich plasma, and stem cells from the bone marrow of his hip. The procedure helped immensely and he was able to return to normal activities. 

​

Less than a few months after that, he worked with a local anesthesiologist who had a shoulder issue. As he saw it, it was his left shoulder being anterior shifted and tilted the former being the culprit. With that he would release the subscapularis muscle with motor point technique. After his first treatment, the scapula was in alignment and he said he felt a little better. He came in for a second treatment. He presented out of alignment again, and we did again the subscapularis motor point treatment. After that he said he was in intense pain. He thought frozen shoulder? The anesthesiologist who was trained in Acupuncture brought a book with him from an acupuncturist in the UK, and said, why don’t we try his techniques? They agreed and they did, and he felt better and his shoulder was in alignment after one treatment. After researching for that book online, he found a book from an acupuncturist in the Pacific Northwest that worked for Boeing as an electrical engineer, and then got into alternative medicine and became an acupuncturist. He said the key to regenerative acupuncture is to use a specific hertz on the stimulation  and to change polarity every 7 1/2 minutes.

 

He started working on these regenerative techniques with himself and his patients getting amazing results with the acupuncture alone. And now has aligned himself with a local MD to administer the platelet rich plasma, injections and prolotherapy for people with degenerative disc disease, tendinitis, tenosynovitis, arthritis, plantar fasciitis and other degenerative conditions. 

 

He started to combine his structural component he developed aligning the tilts and shifts of the shoulder and pelvic girdles and the corresponding rotations of the lumbar thoracic and cervical spine to be optimized with our nervous system with the regenerative technique. Calling it a hybrid approach. If there was a strong alignment that needed to be done on the spine, he could work with that on the single hertz motor point avenue while going in between the spine and use the regenerative frequency to heal the degenerative tissues. Combining the three treatment modalities ushered in a new generation of healing. The likes of which mankind has never seen before.