One thing that makes Life West special is the amount of real world experience our students are able to access. We house state-of-the-art clinics where students learn from real world chiropractic interactions with thousands of patients every year.
Beyond the in-house clinical experience, the college also hosts chiropractic service trips around the world. This provides a kind of experience that cannot happen on campus. In these environments, without the use of sophisticated equipment and technology, our students test their knowledge and quick decision making while serving hundreds of patients in unusual environments.
Ninth quarter student, Joshua Adams, had the opportunity to serve on the recent Mission Trip India. While serving there, Adams met a patient who had never seen a chiropractor before in his life. The patient complaint was that he was unable to squat down to use the traditional toilets in India.
“I assessed his posture and gait as he walked over to the table. His hands were on his knees. He was hunched over with apparent pain and discomfort portrayed through his facial expressions with every hobbled step he took,” Adams recollects.
The patient explained to the translator that he had an accident in the gym where he experienced a sharp debilitating pain in his back three months prior.
“He described his MRI report and x-rays, which he brought the next day, stating that he had stage three avascular necrosis of his hips and 70% destruction of the L4-L5 and L5-S1 disc. He was scheduled for surgery in two weeks. His reason for visiting me that day was to get some pain relief before his surgery,” Adams says.
Adams had his patient lay face down on the table and performed a basic diversified analysis of his spine.
“Everything was pointing to a base posterior sacrum and right rotated lumbar spine. When I placed the patient in the position to adjust his base posterior sacrum, he was in extreme pain,” Adams says.
Adams was nervous to proceed but with the blessing of his patient, he delivered the adjustment. When Adams finished, the patient was in tears. He exclaimed through sobs of joy that he felt 90% better. Adams rechecked his lumbar spine which still felt rotated to the right.
“I had him rotate to the other side and adjusted the fourth lumbar back into the proper direction. After that he said that he felt 99% better. He got up off of the table and was able to bend over to touch his toes and squat down,” Adams describes happily.
Adams proudly adds, “As part of the culture in the Nirankari Mission, it is customary to touch the feet of the other person when greeting them. After the adjustment, he knelt down on the ground and touched his head to my feet, which my translator told me was the highest form of respect.”
When asked how providing such a life changing adjustment made him feel, Adams replied, “Honestly, I was extremely grateful to be part of it [Sant Nirankari Mission] and I knew that I didn’t really do anything. His body and his innate intelligence were ready for the change and ready to heal.”
Hearing first-hand experiences like Adams’ is heart-warming on a human level. We love to share these stories with the faculty and staff at Life West — who work tirelessly to help hone the skills of our chiropractic students. Stories like this are shared each quarter in Friday Seminar as part of our Clinical Success Stories series.
Life West will never stop working to send the best chiropractors into the world and to create a brighter future for humanity.
Written By: Margarita Ablaza
