This blog entry should really have been written by Dr. Alvarez, but apparently I have dumped one too many administrative duties on her desk this week, so I will try to do it a wee bit of justice.

In the “beyond pain” series, I have discussed two aspect of spinal functional lesions (AKA subluxation in our technical jargon), that are not manifested as pain: loss of normal sensory perception and loss of normal energy expenditure resulting in fatigue. There are two more on the list and the next one is dyskinesia: the impairment of normal voluntary motor function.

Dyskinesia can be difficult to explain. People often think that we are talking about loss of strength, or loss of movement, but neither fully captures it. Dyskinesia is what happens when you want to accomplish a movement but the movement does not come out the way you want it: the range is not correct, the aim is not correct, the amount of force is too little or too much, or the movement itself is choppy instead of smooth.

Athletes instinctively know what dyskinesia is, even if they have never heard the word: when your pitching arm doesn’t release at the right time, when you overshoot your jump for example. Your brain circuitry has perfectly issued the command but the execution is distorted. You do not have to be an athlete to experience dyskinesia. Musicians are acutely aware of that problem when hitting the right key or the right string as well, and the “athletes of daily life” will see that manifestation when your intended muscle movement is rachety and inefficient, for example when typing or writing by hand.

One of my mentors in my last year of school was educating his patients about how to detect non-pain manifestation of their recurring spinal issues with an old fashioned fridge magnet (good marketing tool, he made some magnets with the office logo). He would have patients stand in front of the fridge, reach out with their index finger to touch the center of the magnet and repeat with their eyes closed. When they started to hit the outside of the magnet, it was time to schedule an appointment. I am pretty sure they had never heard of that word either, but they understood the correlation between spinal functional lesions and loss or motor efficiency.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320306138_Heart_Rate_Variability_to_Assess_the_Changes_in_Autonomic_Nervous_System_Function_Associated_With_Vertebral_Subluxation

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