Finally I get to sit down and write a blog post. Yes I know, it’s been a long time coming. I spent the first three and a half months of this year building a new website, which taxed my skills to the limit. When it was finished I relaxed and got back to concentrating on the real therapy work. The trouble was I relaxed a little too soon. I logged into the back end of my website the other day to find five users online. This was a little strange seeing as I am the only user, so I clicked on the users tab and found that there were a thousand users! A friend had suggested that I have a forum on my site so that people could discuss the ideas I was presenting. It seemed like a good idea so I incorporated one. The last job before I published the website was working out how to enable people to register for the forum. In the end I discovered that I had to enable ‘user registration’ in the Joomla (content management systems) settings. I did so and all was up and running, but I had neglected to pay attention to the other settings that go with this and had inadvertently allowed users to register without my knowledge. A thousand spammers (or spambots) had registered on my forum and when I went to the forum I discovered 3,500 spam posts! Considering that I had to delete all these one page (twenty items) at a time, you can imagine how long it took. Once the spammers start getting in it attracts more and more so the numbers rise exponentially. Another week and they might have crashed my whole website. Once I adjusted the registration settings I thought the issue may be resolved, but not only did I get bulk email requests for registration, but the spambots find ways around the security and manage to register anyway. I disabled the user registration and took the forum offline.
So now I’ve got serious about website security. I have antivirus protection, which I previously thought was something you had for your computer not your website, a spam filter for blog post comments and the forum remains offline. I will look into ways of securing the forum, but may decide it was a step too far and discard it.
Despite the time wasting computer, I have been cracking on with the therapy work and continue to make progress. When we started working on my head, I didn’t understand that a head could change in its configuration, volume, density, shape etc, so was quite amazed when it did, and did dramatically. With damage to the spinal cord it is as though the tension is flushed out of the spine and this extends right up into the dura of the head, resulting in considerable depletion in the bio-mechanical quality of the structure of the head. Over the last few years I’ve had phase after phase of expansion and consolidation. The occipital region at the back of the head has been drawn back out, the sides of my skull are much more rounded, my face has filled out considerably and there is more strength in the connection of the jaw. A few months ago I noticed a tender spot on the side of my skull above the right ear. As I have continued to work extensively on my head this weakness has become more and more exposed. It became clear to me that this weakness is one that has remained from a fracture to the skull inflicted in an accident eight years before breaking my back. At the age of twenty I was run over by a car and my head was hit on the side by the sump of the engine. That’s a ton of metal travelling at at least 60mph! Not only was my skull fractured, but I contracted meningitis and have never heard in my right ear since.
Our bodies are amazingly clever at adapting, but are not all that good at actually healing by themselves. If the injury is slight then the body will recover fully, but with something more serious the body needs encouragement to heal. Many of us experience old injuries that come back to haunt us. The fracture to my skull was left to heal with time and once it had stopped hurting I assumed it was healed, but it appears that rather than truly heal, the skull simply closes up burying the weakness. This allows life to continue, but in a slightly depleted condition. With all the work I have done on my head, the skull has opened up and once again exposed the weakness from the original fracture. A week ago it felt like my skull had been fractured all over again with a fissure running up through the middle of the temporal bone and even up in to the parietal bone, but the good side to this is that, once the weakness is exposed you can then address it through the therapy techniques we use and truly heal it, all these years later.
ABR Therapy is giving me the opportunity to revisit a few old injuries and bring about healing that I never imagined possible after so many years. With all the recent development in my head, there is even a chance of hearing once again in my right ear, after 28 years of deafness.
Spinalroots 