C.H.E.K. Practitioner

If you’re going through life with chronic pain or injury, it’s possible that your cause hasn’t been identified or resolved.

As a C.H.E.K. Practitioner, Peter was taught to use the ‘Survival Totem Pole’ by Paul Chek in 2006 to help resolve challenging pains & injuries.

This unique approach is used to help identity the cause of your problems based upon the body’s need for survival. 

Our most vital functions are at the top, because they are more important for survival. 

Our vital functions are:

• Breathing / Respiratory function (to stay alive)
• TMJ (jaw) & teeth alignment & function (to eat)
• Vision (to look out for environmental threats & prey) 
• Hearing & Balance (to hear environmental threats, & prevent falls)

What this means, is that if someone has lower back pain, it’s possible that the cause could be due to a jaw alignment problem – the lower back is the area of compensation, in an attempt to maintain optimal jaw alignment. Lower back pain could also be due to what you’re eating (essentially switching your abdominal muscles off), as another example, therefore nutritional changes would be the solution, and not ‘core’ exercises. The body will compensate in non-vital areas, to optimise the vital functions that are crucial to keep us alive. Even though staying alive is much easier today than when we were cave people, it takes the human genome around 100,000 years to change 0.001%, so is therefore biologically the same in a modern world.

Here are a few client examples of how the Survival Totem Pole is used: 

Note the scoliosis indicated by the red arrows, and the shift to the right within each red circle. The change indicated by the green arrows and circles, from identifying the source, occurred within 1 minute!

This client suffered lower back pain, and by simply teaching the correct position of the pelvis, it has taken the stress out of her lower back; and the flat stomach is not from sit ups, crunches or even diet!

Here you can see from the base of the neck up, there is a deviation of the head & neck to the right. 

The correction with this client was made by balancing the jaw (TMJ) through manual therapy, and doing cranial work (a rebalancing of the skull bones). 

So, if you’ve been experiencing short term relief, or require regular ‘maintenance’ treatments, for your pain or injury, you may benefit from having your body assessed holistically in pursuit to address the cause, rather than the symptoms only.