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Having been playing bass guitars for thirty years, I’ve sustained quite a lot of injuries to my arms and hands without doing anything about it. Early last year, I started getting burning pains in my left arm if I held it in a certain position and put pressure on it. John Paul Destefani of B# Studios advised me to go and see a Chiropractor. This was after I had had a consultation with an orthopedic surgeon who sent me off to a neuro surgeon for tests on the nerve and then advised me to have an op where he would remove the muscle from my bone and re-route the nerve going down my arm. This sounded quite drastic (not to mention, painful) and my wife and I weren’t really brimming with enthusiasm in having my arm dismantled. Then came my conversation with John Paul – I have to admit that I had never even heard of a Chiropractor before let alone know what they actually do. I asked John more about this profession and he told me quite a lot and mentioned that a Chiropractor would take me in another direction away from surgery. This is what I wanted to hear – I hadn’t had a stay in hospital since I had my appendix out at age 10 and didn’t relish going back.. A friend of mine knew a Chiropractor working in Meyersdal, Alberton so I booked an appointment and popped along to see Dr Ashleigh Deall at the Meyerdal Chiropratic Clinic a few days later. After going through all the formality questions such as age, smoker / non-smoker, drinker / non-drinker, etc etc – you know the drill, Ash got to work on my arm. I think she was a little surprised that I already knew about Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
Basically a Chiropractor is a kind of advanced physiotherapist and my arm, wrist and fingers were given an extremely good massaging. I walked out of her practice with an arm that hasn’t given me one second of pain ever since. I have been back to see Ash about four times since the first time to have further work done on my wrists and fingers that were also in need of attention and she even gave me exercises to do by myself at home to de-stress certain areas and these have also helped me a great deal. Another thing that Ash advised was to purchase a special kind of bandage that has a small sack filled with air that I strap onto my lower left arm when I’m playing bass – it was originally designed for tennis players – you all know about Tennis Elbow and Golfers Elbow – well this German made bandage (goes well with my Warwick) works just as well for bassplayers too and would probably make a great talking point at gigs if I still did ‘em!!! Don’t, however, wear this bandage continually as your muscles will deteriorate – it’s for use as a support device, not a crutch - but used when you’re playing, it is very helpful. I was thinking about getting Ash to write an article for our web site and newsletter – we could also ask her to come to a bass evening to address us and demonstrate the exercises we could all do for ourselves to relieve the various stresses our arms and wrists suffer – funnily enough, a large amount of bassplayers live in the Alberton area and she would be only too happy to help the local players deal with their stresses and strains.
A few weeks ago, I was going through my old copies of Bassplayer magazine, looking for pics of basses to plaster all over the newsletter when I came across an article written by Arlo Gordin D.C. - a Chiropractor who looks after Billy Sheehan’s hands. The article is called Heal Your Hands and it can be found in issue Jan/Feb 1994.
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