I'm giving Philip Brown very high marks for what I was able to accomplish through his help. The process I needed to go through to recover from the bone-spurring and osteoarthritic development of my ankle without major surgery was my goal. I've been a distance runner, mostly trail runner, since my cross-country days as a high school runner. I had to finish running and switch to cycling and other forms of exercise back in November 2006 and do my best to recover. I journeyed through many therapies and found two that included a ton of homework. I've been teaching human anatomy and physiology at both graduate and undergraduate levels since 1987 specializing in dissection lab. Perhaps it was my knowledge of anatomy that got in the way at times of seeing so very clearly the relationship of back curvature, postural issues, movement kinesiology and the muscle adhesions of a 50-something that had endured lots of exercise, injury and recovery.
The fix for me came in two stages. Learning standing qi gong from Liping Zhu at http://www.qidragon.com as a kind of "test" or metered way of seeing how good I was getting at simply standing with good structure. The second step was all of the homework that Philip Brown gave me as he melted through various muscle adhesions and presented his standard homework techniques that allowed me to learn new movements and arrive at new structural postures.
The second step also included Philip Brown's lifetime knowledge of yoga. Philip has been a student and teacher of yoga most of his adult life before switching careers to go into this area of physical therapy. Yoga and tai ji are still on going parts of his life. I took me a year of Philip teaching me how to stand, sit, put new structural curves in my spine, and finally walk without pain. The proof came when I ran 10 miles two years into my practice.
For those who stopped reading as soon as I said one year and then spoke of my two year recovery, I have a small clue to share with you. The lower anatomy of a human being has poor circulation compared to the rest of the anatomy. I've shattered my elbow, had it rewired, went through the physical therapy and I have full range of motion with no pain or arthritic development. Chronic injury from the knee on downward gets progressively more difficult to recover from. It's a fact of life.
Now at 61 I can go back to all of my activities, but I do have to be very mindful of daily practices of posture, structure while standing, kinesiology of movement and all of the homework lessons. But I get to walk, run, cycle and be fully active. So there's a price and there's benefits. Depends on how much it matters to you, how much you're willing to commit to the work it takes to be truly active and aerobically fit into the latter part of life.
I may have caused some people not to try Philip Brown and caused them to seek joint surgery. It takes a part of my day every day to practice movement and posture and self administer massage and stretching. This is how one treats the root of chronic joint injury.
BTW, my original review was here:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/philip-brown-bodywork-structural-integration-san-francisco#hrid:kZawJbsEa5nSSEvBMOHg9A/src:self
I've included pictures at that location. read more
