Health and Exercise

The day Pam Flynn hurt her knee was the best day of Helen Bibb’s life, say the neighbors on Hortense Street in North Hollywood. That mishap launched a journey for Bibb’s daughter Laura, a 10-year old, developmentally delayed girl, who went from being the neighborhood pity to the neighborhood Rocky. This happened all because Pam Flynn hurt her knee and went to see a local chiropractor. This started a chain of events.

It’s one of those quiet residential blocks surrounded by a city. It’s where people move in and stay a lifetime. It’s where neighbors know more about each other than their names and what kind of cars they drive. They know their personal lives, both the good and the bad. Pam Flynn and neighbor Tracy Johnson and Elaine Alexander have shared many cups of morning coffee with Helen Bibb. And over the years, they’ve heard how Helen’s daughter, Laura, was diagnosed as a baby as being mildly mentally retarded and was always looking for the answer to her problems. And that when it came true for her to start school, her skills and test scores placed her at the severely retarded level in her class.

They learned that Helen and her husband never stopped fighting for their daughter and that Helen spent half her lifetime looking for the answer to her daughter’s problems. She wanted to know why she kept falling, or would start to binge-eat and refuse to talk to even her family for long stretches of time.

She couldn’t find the answers that she hoped for, and neither did her doctors, who vowed that everything medical science had to offer was being done to help her daughter. “I was on the diagnosis merry-go-round, going nowhere,” Helen says. This is very common. “There were plenty of explanations and excuses, but no answers.”

The newest problem came when Laura began to suffer from swelling in her knees that were diagnosed as very bad growing pains. “She had foot orthotics put in her shoes to help her, but her knees were still swollen and getting worse regardless of the treatment.” Helen said “Her right leg and foot were starting to turn in. The orthopedic doctors suggested knee braces and painkillers.” This was not the answer for her problem.

From behind their window on her street the neighbors watched the slow deterioration of this little girl they had known since birth. She could now hardly walk down the street without falling down on the pavement.

“We had all watched her grow up as a child, and to see her in pain, falling down like this, well, it was heartbreaking,” said the neighbors on the street where she lived. There was nothing they could do but give the family moral support and advice that fell short of the answer that they needed. They weren’t specialists and they didn’t know what to do in this case.

Then one day, Pam Flynn wrenched her knee and went to see a local chiropractor for her ailment. While she was being treated by the doctor, she mentioned her 10-year-old neighbor who was falling down all the time on the pavement, and would soon need braces and a steady diet of painkillers just to get around all the time. “The idea of this wonderful girl who had already been through so much, now needing braces to walk really threw me,” Pam said.

When she got home later that day, Pam knocked on her next-door neighbor’s door and told Helen about her chiropractor, and that he also treated kids. “Go see him,” Pam said. “What could it hurt?”

“I was looking for anything that would interfere with Laura’s nervous system, and I found a vertebra at the base of her skull was way out of place and putting pressure on her nerves,” the chiropractor said. So he adjusted it. So simple, Helen said. An adjustment. Not braces and painkillers. Just a simple adjustment to fix the problem.

“The first thing Laura did was let out a big sigh of relief,” Helen said. “That night she came down the stairs by herself. We were stunned at what was happening. This used to take forever with Laura holding on to both rails, her dad in front so she wouldn’t fall, and me guiding from behind.”

“Laura now wants to move and run and be a real kid for the first time. All the doctors said that her foot would stay turned in and there was nothing they could do. Well, her foot has straightened out too.” And during the summer, her daughter did something Helen, in her most optimistic dreams, never would have thought possible. With her mom and dad, younger sister Julie, and older brother Edward cheering her on and bursting with pride, Laura swam with the dolphins at Sea World.

“She’s an entirely different little girl, mentally as well as physically,” says neighbor Elaine. “She used to be shy and hide behind her mother. Now, she’s in the open talking. When we’d walk the dogs, Laura couldn’t keep up. Now, she’s out front. It’s been a remarkable transformation.”

Miracle or simply a spinal adjustment, her parents feel like the luckiest people in the world, seeing their daughter smiling and happier than ever before because of the chiropractor.

The little girl who used to be the neighborhood pity is now the neighborhood Rocky, leading the pack. Stories like this and more happen every day at the chiropractic office of New Century Spine Centers in San Diego.

Learn more about chiropractic. Stop by New Century Spine Centers site where you can find out all about chiropractic in San Diego and what it can do for you.