Hilary Beard's Blog

Last week, Oprah ran an “Ask Dr. Oz segment,” featuring Dr. Mehmet Oz, author of “You: The Owner’s Manual” and “You: On a Diet,” which featured alternative treatments. First up, rolfing, one of my favorite complementary health modalities. I like to describe rolfing as the soft-tissue equivalent of chiropractic work. Just as a chiropractor realigns your bones, a rolfer realigns and reorganizes your muscles and the other soft tissues in your body. Now, I’ll be honest: rolfing is an investment. It often costs $150/per 60- to 75-minute session. Ideally, you’ll get 10 sessions, during which your entire body is realigned. Ka-ching! But it’s worth it. I’m convinced that it’s changed my life and that I am aging differently because of it.

I first got rolfed in 1996, when I awakened one morning to discover that my right heel felt to painful to step on. I limped around on it for a couple of days, thinking I had injured it while playing beach volleyball the night before. But it didn’t go away. So I made an appointment with a podiatrist—a foot doctor—who told me that I had bad bunions, and that the bunions were causing problems in my heel. (I'd upload a picture of my feet so you can see them, but I fear that they'll end up on some foot-fetish website!) His prescription: a cortisone steroid shot to ease the inflammation, a $500 orthotic device to improve my foot function, and surgery to correct my bunions.

Hmm… Well, I do have bunions—but not bad ones; black people know bunions! And while the cortisone shot eliminated the pain—at least temporarily—his explanation of bunions as the root cause of my discomfort didn’t make sense to me. If bunions were the cause, I reasoned, I would have experienced discomfort that had gradually worsened over time. Instead, the pain had developed overnight. I knew that doctors make recommendations based on what they know about. Podiatrists’ training includes prescribing orthotics and doing foot surgery. But they aren’t necessarily knowledgeable about other approaches. I got the orthotic device—ka-ching!—but felt that bunion surgery would have left me worse off.

Being an informed consumer of medical services, I didn’t do everything the doctor ordered; I sought out alternative solutions. Enter rolfing, which I had first learned of in 1990 and had avoided, since I was told that it’s painful. Well, not exactly. Rolfing is only uncomfortable to the extent that you are holding stress in your body. But I get ahead of myself; I’ll explain more later.

So I made an appointment with a rolfer. He asked me to strip down to my underwear (you don’t have to) and walk around the room. As I walked, he observed that there was something unnatural about my gait and that it was originating in my left ankle.

“You’re limping,” he told me.

He was right. I had broken my left ankle 20 years earlier and, in spite of a lot of physical therapy and strengthening exercises, it hadn’t felt right since. I had even asked people if they thought I was limping and they would tell me no. But I had known better, and now the rolfer was confirming my suspicions.

“You’re not extending properly when you push off of your left foot,” he told me. “That’s setting off a chain reaction in your legs and hips. One of your hips is higher than the other. I suspect that the answer to the pain in your right heel begins in your left foot. If you don’t mind, I’d like to begin there.” That immediately made sense.

While rolfing is bodywork, it isn’t anything like massage. A masseuse rubs and kneads your muscles; a rolfer works surgically using an individual finger, a fist, a forearm and occasionally an elbow, focusing on one muscle at a time. My rolfer began in my left ankle, where, I realized for the first time muscles deep inside my feet and ankle were very tender and sore. Then he worked up my calf, where with one finger he pushed along one muscle that ran from my ankle to my knee. I was surprised to discover that it, too, was sore. He manipulated something in my knee, then moved to my thigh, which was tender, then to my hip and buttock, which also had soreness deep down. At that point he moved across to my right side, where he worked first on my right hip and buttock, then down my thigh and into my calf. Then he was done.

“Aren’t you going work on my heel?” I asked.

“I don’t think I need to,” he replied. “Why don’t you walk around?”

When I got up, the pain was gone and I haven’t experienced it since. At the end of the session, when I went to put on my shoes, he told me I’d need to throw out my orthotics.

“But I paid $500 for them!”

“They will lock your feet into the painful position,” he said. “I just freed you of the pain. Why would you put yourself back in it?”

His explanation kind of made sense, but I wasn't convinced. My motherwit told me not to throw out something I paid $500 for. So I held onto them for years. But I never needed them—I never experienced any pain again!

My second experience with rolfing occurred after my mother died. When she became seriously ill, I would find myself clenching my body, often my buttocks. Eventually, I developed a soreness in my right quadriceps (the back of the thigh), from clutching my muscles as I drove to the hospital. By now, I knew that stress can kill you. So while my mother was dying (I would never have said that out loud at the time, but I suspected that that was what was happening), I invested in a weekly massage to get the tension out of my body. But while the massage helped, the tightness returned within a day or so, and massage never removed the cramp in the back of my leg. After mommy died, I decided to invest in the entire 10-session series as a gift to myself.

Each rolfing session focuses on a different part of your body. Session 2, I believe, focused on my spine. All I know is that when I came out of the appointment, I was a full inch taller than I was when I went in. The treatment had removed compression in my spine that had developed during my long commutes to work and from sitting so much. It realigned the muscles so that they pulled my spine straight. Only one session was uncomfortable—the session where he worked on my chest. And, I must admit, that session was extremely painful. But it wasn’t because my rolfer was hurting me; it was because I was hurting within myself. When my rolfer tapped lightly on my sternum, the bone that runs down the center of your chest, I cried out in pain. He was barely touching me but it hurt like heck!

“You’re holding a lot of tension in your chest,” he told me. “Do you smoke?”

“No, but I’ve been having trouble breathing at night,” I told him. “Ever since my mother died, if I sleep on my back, I wake up choking in the middle of the night. I feel like I’m choking—it’s almost like I’ve stopped breathing (Note: I now know that this is a classic sign of sleep apnea).”

“You can’t breathe,” he told me. “Your ribs are compressed very tightly--like a smoker’s. There’s not enough room for your lungs to expand. You’re not getting enough oxygen.”

He asked me to breathe deeply while he literally pulled apart my breastplate and made more space in my chest cavity. This hurt. A lot. But it wasn’t because what he was doing was so awful; it was because my muscles were all in spasm. I had to deep-breathe for a minute or two while he worked with the area. When he was done, I felt my lungs expand and oxygen rush into my body. Then I burst into tears. I cried and cried and cried. All the tears that I had suppressed because I hadn’t wanted to fall out at my mother’s funeral because it had been important to me to speak. Tears I hadn’t cried because there had been family business to tend to. Tears I hadn’t cried because I was tired of crying—my father had died just 5 years earlier and I had grieved so much then. Tears, I now learned, that were literally choking me.

That night, I got a good night’s sleep for the first time in a long time. Not only did I rest through the night, I didn’t wake up feeling like I had stopped breathing. In a later session, he removed the spasm from my thigh. I had my body back—free from the stress of the trauma I had experienced and was holding in my body. Stress I now know can poison you.

This is why I tell people that rolfing has literally saved my life.

To find a rolfer, go here. Please be patient if the rolfer doesn't immediately return your call. They're probably swamped with the crush of Oprah viewers.