When you show a spine

Now, social media is abuzz with talk of chiropractic clinics, which offer similar results. Rana Siddiqui Zaman visits them both in Delhi

Fareed runs a dawakhand with his son Firoz in Laxmi Nagar, Delhi.

Gulzar, 67, may have a decrepit clinic in Old Delhi but he gets steady stream of customers.

Suffering from frozen shoulder and lower back pain, I was looking for a healer who wouldn’t charge me a fortune. Then I chanced upon Chris Leong, a chiropractor from Malaysia, on YouTube. In the video, a patient, visibly in pain and barely able to walk, visits Leong. The latter checks his spine. Then he puts pressure with his palms on the patient’s back, pulling here, pushing there. With each adjustment, a popping sound fills the air. Ten minutes later, the patient’s posture seems straighter. He says the pain has gone, and he doesn’t need his family to help him walk. I wanted to be in his place!

So far I had managed with pain killers, night walks, and physiotherapy. My sedentary lifestyle was to blame, I gathered. I had started working in 1995, just a couple of years after computers came into Indian newsrooms. Sitting hunched over the computer for six to eight hours every day for 25 years had taken a toll on my body posture.

Read | Over 800 million people may suffer back pain by 2050

That night, I googled to find out more about Leong’s specialisation. It is called chiropractic and it treats biomechanical disorders, especially of the spine. Chiropractors apply controlled pressure to ease pain. While Wikipedia warned that chiropractic is ‘pseudoscientific’, I would soon read that it was practised in 70-plus countries, and was especially popular in the USA, UK and Australia. In Switzerland, it is part of mainstream medicine and is also covered by insurance. With my frozen shoulder and back pain not letting up, I decided to give chiropractic a shot. I found my Chris Leong in Dr Asif Naqvi.

All is spine

Dr Naqvi’s 2,000 sq ft clinic is located in New Delhi’s posh Defence Colony. I was given the last appointment for the day as I planned to interview him after a treatment session. I passed masseur rooms, cold press and heat technique chambers, an orthopaedic’s cubicle, paintings, sculptures, and a long line of seats on either side of the lobby. A fragrance hung in the air.

Dr Naqvi was 50-plus but he looked fit, the gym going-kind. He wore a high-neck sweatshirt to beat the Delhi winter. His chamber was well-lit and ventilated, and had a life-size skeleton, models of spines, and posters of the human nervous and muscular systems. It also had a stretcher-type cushioned couch with a hole.

I started my drill: What is chiropracty? Is it pseudoscience? Does the government recognise it? Dr Naqvi began by correcting me: “There is nothing called chiropracty or chiropathy. It is called chiropractic.” He had studied it in Sweden after taking a degree in physiotherapy and a master’s in sports injury treatment.

Disappointment flashed across his face when I asked why chiropractic is dubbed a pseudoscience. He didn’t go on the defensive. He offered me “tea, coffee or fresh lime soda” before
sharing that physiotherapy (allied) and chiropractic (paramedical) are sister practices.

“Physiotherapy is more about muscle building, strengthening, and post-operative rehabilitation, and is done with machines,” he said. Chiropractic, on the other hand, works to restore the biomechanics of the body that decides how we walk, stand, and sit. The spine alignment is done with bare hands. “If the alignment goes awry, it cannot be treated with medicines or physiotherapy,” he said, adding that a chiropractor can alleviate joint problems faster than a physiotherapist but neurological problems take longer.

Session time

Amid niggling scepticism, I lay face down on the couch. Dr Naqvi placed a napkin and lowered my face into the hole in the couch. Instructions began: Loosen your body. Relax. Stop stressing. Keep your hands on the side. Breathe in. Breathe out.

He examined my spine with his hands. He put pressure with his palms, one over the other, repeating “breathe in, breathe out, don’t hold your breath” and pushing at a “misalignment”. A crackling sound rent the air. I screamed in pain. He continued without pausing or heeding my feedback. He turned my neck gently. I felt like those dolls in horror films whose necks go round and round. The ‘krracck’ sound did not abate, and it seemed like he had found a misalignment almost everywhere in my body!

Next, he made me sit up; shook my body and ‘loosened’ it; snapped my wrist and fingers. Sometimes the ‘snap’ was so loud and painful that I feared I might have broken a bone! I was nearly in tears.

To divert my attention, I asked about the popping sound. “When pressure is exerted on a joint suddenly, some (trapped) nitrogen gushes out with a pop sound,” he explained and then mocking my reproachful stares, added, “You are stiff. Haven’t you moved your body for some years? It needs oiling, madam!”

Covid-19 lockdowns and work from home led to lethargy — I made excuses. “You need more sessions and you need to be less scared. We don’t break bones. We set dislocated ones to their natural positions,” he said with a laugh.

20 minutes later

After the session, I could move my arms better. The pain in my frozen shoulder had abated but the pain in the lower back persisted. The doctor warned me about a deep depression on my lower back, which could lead to a slouch. “This must be treated or pain can become unbearable. Core-building exercises will also help,” he advised.

I was sulking as I felt only partially relieved unlike Leong’s patient who had walked out with a spring in his step. To prove his credentials, Dr Naqvi called my 51-year-old husband, who was accompanying me, inside. Dr Naqvi noticed his body was drooping to the right and also his hunchback.

He asked my husband to lie down on the couch face down and assessed that his left leg is shorter, he carries a wallet in the right-back pocket, and he sits to the right side while using the computer. “That’s why your right is taking more pressure. Stop doing these things or you will have a faulty walk with age,” he said.

After the 20-minute session, my husband shrugged his shoulders freely, and walked straight. The hunch had gone. I was jealous!

Contented, the doctor said, “Earlier, most of the patients I saw used to be in their 70s. Now we get 20- and 30-year-olds. Most work in the IT industry or in BPOs. They sit for long hours at work.” His patients comprise foreign diplomats and businessmen, NRIs, and Indian families who have children abroad and know about chiropractic — largely those who prefer non-invasive, drugless alternatives.

Fearing that this might offend him, I still asked how chiropractors are different from traditional bone-setters, who go by names like fareed pehelwan, or haddi jodney waale? He smiled and said, “It’s like comparing a butcher and a surgeon. Fareed pehelwans may press a nerve wrongly, paralysing a patient for life.”

After my visit, I suggested Basundha Banerjee, a journalist, meet Dr Naqvi. She had a bad fall in 2016 and taking even 500 steps was agonising for her. But she told me she was able to walk 1,000 steps easily right after one chiropractic session. She was advised five sessions in five weeks, at a fee of Rs 1,000 each.

The other world

The visit to Dr Naqvi’s clinic brought back childhood memories from my visit to Asansol in West Bengal. Unable to afford an orthopaedic doctor, I remember my neighbour’s mother had called one fareed pehelwan home to fix her fractured leg.

He made her smell something from a bottle (Was it some local anaesthesia?). He grasped her leg and set the bone ‘right’. His subordinate crushed turmeric, pungent herbs, and tree barks together and mixed them with fragrant oils. He applied the paste on the fractured area, covered it with betel leaves and a cane-mesh that looked like a batting pad, and bandaged it all over. The woman was walking by the time the healer came visiting a fortnight later. This was four decades ago.

I was curious to know if such bone-setters still exist. In my early years in Delhi, I would see life-size posters of fareed pehelwans setting the bones of Bollywood stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan pasted on dawakhanas (clinics). On my latest hunt, I found they are still around and operate out of alleys in low-income neighbourhoods or bustling market areas.

I arrived in Laxmi Nagar in east Delhi. Posters on the walls of a 8x12 ft clinic declared it could cure everything from arthritis to spinal injuries, and sciatica to hair loss. Inside I met a 60-something Fareed and his son Firoz, 35.

I got talking to a 22-year-old patient. “I came here when I nearly broke my arm while lifting weights at the gym. My fingers had stopped moving. I visit this clinic every three or four days to get my bandages changed. Now I can move my fingers,” he told me as he laboured to open and close his fist. “The recovery will happen in a few sessions,” Fareed pitched in as he kept Rs 300 in a drawer as his fee. Then on his commands, Firoz looked at the man’s forearm, murmured something, applied a lape (a paste of turmeric, herbs, limestone, etc), massaged it, and tied a bandage tightly.

Fareed’s life is straight from a movie. “I was a wrestler. I played at the Delhi level till 1982. If a wrestler’s bone got dislocated, our ustad (Rahimuddin) used to reset it in a few days by applying a lape. I learnt this art, and started treating people for free,” he said. But when his father’s wood trimming and burning
business was ordered shut by the government on grounds of pollution, Fareed took up bone-setting as a career.

To learn remedies, he turned to rare books on herbs. He showed the books to me. They were in Urdu, Arabic and Persian. He learnt how to make lapes from “hakim Suleiman’s books”.

The father-son duo saw a steady stream of 20 patients in three hours. The injuries had
occurred at gyms, because of accidents, or while playing. Why do people turn to Fareed after visiting hospitals? “In most cases, it is the patients’ fault. They run out of patience and remove the cast. They do the same with us,” he said.

But when patients co-operate, recovery is guaranteed, Fareed claimed, and dialled a journalist from Delhi. Shadaab, the caller on the other side, told me, “After a spinal injury, I was bed-ridden for three months. Fareed saab treated me. Now I can drive to the office.”

The next day, I set out for old Delhi with popular sufi singer Danish Hilal Khan, a local. We stopped by a dawakhana, two feet under the Kala Mahal street. We bent down and peered in. Khan called out to its 67-year-old owner Gulzar: “Madam aayin hai. Interview lene. (Ma’am has come to interview you).” He refused to come out, saying he heals only for “Allah’s mercy and doesn’t want any popularity.”

I persisted and a few minutes later, I was stepping four stairs down to his clinic, so small that we had to take care not to hit the ceiling fan. To my disbelief, patients from poor and middle-class families kept pouring in until 10 pm with problems ranging from a dysfunctional arm to kidney problems and cervical pain. Gulzar asked a 14-year-old boy to bend “like a horse”. He muttered something and pulled his left leg gently. “Aaahhh!”, the boy let out. “It’s okay now,” he said smilingly. Gulzar charges nothing to Rs 250, depending on the financial capacity of his patients.

Gulzar comes from a lineage of wrestlers and bone-setters dating nearly 150 years. “Earlier, only wrestlers used to set bones. I didn’t want to do it because the income was less. But my hand has shifa (healing powers), so I do it daily, from 11.30 am to 2 am,” he said. During the pandemic, patients would come looking for him even at his home. Interestingly, like wrestler-healers in India, many healers in Asian countries come with a background in martial arts, including Leong from that YouTube video!

‘You decide’

During the course of this story, my husband and I met with an accident. It left an unbearable pain in his left foot. We went to the hospital — no fracture, an X-ray report confirmed. Then we made a dash to Fareed, who massaged a lape on my husband’s foot. He asked him to soak his legs in lukewarm water with alum and rock salt for a few days, and apply an ointment he had prepared. He didn’t promise a speedy recovery. When we went to Gulzar, he told us my husband had a misalignment that X-rays would never show and only wrestlers like him could feel. “I can pull it and correct it in one go. You decide,” Gulzar told my husband. “No, I am fine with alum-salt water soaks,” my husband said.

Doctors speak

Dr Randeep Guleria, former director of AllMS, Delhi, doesn’t dismiss chiropractic but says like most medical practices, it has to find wide acceptance before it is seen as legitimate.

Meanwhile, cities like Surat and Mumbai now have chiropractic councils. An autonomous body called the All India Council of Chiropractic and Science also exists.

However, Dr Nikhil Kumar, senior orthopaedician based in Delhi, dubs it a pseudoscience. “Whatever we do has scientific proof whereas chiropractors act on hearsay,” he says, adding that the National Medical Commission should crack down on “quacks in states like Bihar”.

Dr Ridhwana Sanam, a senior consulting physiotherapist in Gurugram, has been advocating the inclusion of physiotherapy and chiropractic in mainstream medicine. But she says, “Surgery is a profitable business for hospitals. Promoting chiropractic will hinder that.