This will be long, and this is my first Yelp review. The site suggested that I should go elsewhere (such as Facebook, or to Google if I had a gmail account), but the links for Facebook, etc. weren't working from the Yelp window.
My sciatica (moderate to excruciating leg pain, caused by a herniated lumbar disc causing continuing nerve trauma) started in late May, and I was living in far western Illinois, I was, however, in the process of moving to Chicago, an enormous task which wasn't completed until four weeks ago. During the three months I was "downstate" with sciatica, I wasn't able to get any effective treatment at all, and they didn't even manage to diagnose my scoliosis (unnatural curvature of the spine). Some of the physical therapy they gave me was actually contraindicated for somebody with scoliosis, and I was only getting worse...I stopped getting any worse when I abandoned the physical therapy!
"Doctor Tom" was recommended to me by a good and reliable friend on the north side of Chicago, and I made my initial appointment as soon as I knew I'd be available, within two days after I would be moved in. Because my condition had reached the point where any walking was painful and I constantly felt "twisted" when I walked, waiting for the appointment was nearly like an eternity.
During the first two appointments (two days apart) I was assessed, X-rayed, and even treated with my first stretching exercises and Chiropractic adjustments. Dr. Bryant asked me if I was aware that I had scoliosis...uh, NO, I wasn't. Downstate doctors (even in not-so-tiny Springfield) couldn't even diagnose that for me, though it was readily VISIBLE (even without X-rays) to Dr. Bryant. He pointed out many asymmetries around my spine - knots on one side and not the other, tight or nearly-frozen connective tissues, strength and muscular responses, etc.
I'm not familiar with the term NUCCA, which Dr. Tom uses, but I will say that there is a wide variety of Chiropractic and adjustment equipment at his practice, far different than my former Chiropractic experience (in the early 1980's) where his practice had one Chiropractic table and very little else. I'll have to "google NUCCA" as soon as I post this...
I've been going three times a week for a month, now, and more than 90% of my pain is gone. After 4 or 5 appointments/adjustments, I was feeling a little skeptical, because the pain had increased again (though not to the intensity experienced over much of the summer), but he explained that the corrections are also painful because the body needs to adjust, and there's a wall poster illustrating this "S-curve" of pain that most patients will need to go through. My pain has almost entirely been chased away, and has now reached the level that I felt during the first or second day of the onset of my sciatica on 24 May.
Dr. Tom Bryant is, indeed, a miracle-worker! I feel that I was close to becoming crippled for life - just my guess, but I'm thinking I was within two weeks of that fate.
I'll admit that some of the treatments and therapy are uncomfortable. The 20-minutes-daily scoliosis wedge therapy, with me lying on my side, is brutally unpleasant (though not all that painful), but I'm thankful for it, and any treatment which actually moves a spine which has been mis-aligned possibly for decades probably will, indeed, be uncomfortable. Certainly that, and the combination of other treatments, is doing something wonderful.
Wonderful, as in finally having the ability to walk around and experience the vitality, the variety, and the vibrancy (yes, the three V's) that the Andersonville and Edgewater neighborhoods of Chicago are ALL about! For example, the best Thai food I've ever had is only a four-minute walk from me.
Interestingly, one of my big original reasons for moving to Chicago (or any of the other large cities I was still considering in 2016...from Los Angeles to Providence) was the availability of "good health care" as I live the elder years of my life. The decision was made on 02 January this year (while walking in 37-degree drizzly/rainy, ugly weather for a couple miles, actually my "perfect thinking weather"), and the moving started in February. Eight moving trips in all; the last four had me dealing with my sciatica (and, no doubt, making it worse).
I didn't know that I would later have BLATANT PROOF that I could be harmed or endangered by rural health care, even before the move was completed. Proof that what a former Viet Nam medic friend told me about three years ago, that I don't want to "have a heart attack" there, was true. This wasn't a heart attack, of course, but if they can't even diagnose scoliosis downstate, I think my medic friend has been proven right.
THANK YOU DR. TOM!! His treatments are "bringing me back to life" again. read more
