After a severe neck injury left her with lingering pain and barely able to open her jaw, a Hatton resident found relief through a form of physical therapy that focused on her body as a whole.
In 2009, Hatton resident Karen Naastad was playing on a swing set with her grand nieces. She fell and broke her C1 vertebrae --the vertebrae at the top of the spine. She was almost placed in a halo, a device used to stabilize the spine after a traumatic neck injury. She wore a brace for six months and recovered, but the injury left her in pain. It wasn’t until she was referred for a treatment called postural restoration that she began to feel free from that pain.
“You just assume: ‘I had an injury, this is the way it's going to be,’” Naastad told the Herald. “We become very accepting of that, and, boy, I'm proof it doesn't have to be that way.”
After her injury, Naastad was working with her East Grand Forks dentist, Paul Stadem. She was wearing a dental splint at night, so she wouldn’t pinch her jaw together while sleeping. But Stadem recognized she needed further help and, in 2016, sent her to Christel Parvey, a physical therapist at Sanford Occupational Medicine Clinic in East Grand Forks, who worked with Naastad along with Laurie Jung, also a therapist there.
Postural restoration is a form of therapy that treats pain by focusing on the body’s movement patterns that contribute to faulty and imbalanced posture. Therapists work to retrain those patterns through exercises and hands-on techniques that allow the body to assume a pain-free posture.
ADVERTISEMENT
They took her through a variety of breathing exercises and worked to strengthen certain muscles, but Naastad kept falling into her previous posture pattern, and the stiffness remained.
The therapists decided she needed to go a step further and sent her to the Postural Restoration Institute in Lincoln, Nebraska, to be outfitted with special glasses. The glasses are layered with different prescriptions that create a different sense of movement for a person, which opens a window of opportunity for therapists to create new movement patterns.
“They made me feel like I was falling so I had to correct myself, and the posture I corrected myself in was how my body was supposed to be standing,” Naastad said.
Those glasses are therapeutic in nature and cannot be worn while driving. Naastad wears them around the house, and they act as a reminder on how she should be moving and carrying herself. It was the combination of the glasses, dental splint and physical therapy that brought her relief.
“She was pretty complicated when she presented to therapy, but Laurie and I have a lot of experience and we've been doing this for a long time,” Parvey said. “We quickly recognized that she needed this interdisciplinary care.”
As time progressed, Naastad said she grew lax in applying what she had learned and had a few flare-ups that brought her back in for treatment. In 2020, pain in her knee became so severe she thought she would be a candidate for joint replacement. She worked with Jung and quickly fell back into the practices she learned before, and again found relief.
“I’m good again,” Naastad said. “I'm going for walks every day; I'm OK.”
Parvey and Jung said postural restoration therapy opened their eyes on how to treat patients. Both have more than a decade of experience with the practice and are certified through the Nebraska-based institute. They bring the holistic approach to all of their patients, whether they have neck, hip or knee problems.
ADVERTISEMENT
“We just found that people were getting better quicker, and they were able to maintain their improvements with the posture restoration approach,” said Jung.
In the region, postural restoration is available at Sanford in East Grand Forks, and Altru Health System in Grand Forks also offers the therapy.
