Recover body sensations and some pressure after Reflexology

Recently a woman from England posted a question on quadriplegics on our Reflexology Forum.

The question brought back a lot of memories of Barbara and my work with paralysis. It first started years a go innocently enough. We were asked by one of our clients to work on Jimmy who had been left disabled by a car accident. His family didn't have much money so we worked for "worm money' or the two or three dollars that his mother gave us from her selling worms.

We would swing by after our office closed and worked on him. Barbara started working on his hands since I was working on his feet. We worked in a cramped room that was cold in the winter and hot in the summer.

One day Barbara noticed that his fingers on the hand opposite to the foot I was working on were moving. (We worked this way because of the tight quarters.)

We didn't know much about quadriplegics at this point in time. Barbara asked Jimmy if he was moving his fingers not knowing that he couldn't. Jimmy replied that no, "Kevin is moving them". We thought he was joking. It took us awhile to realize that in fact you could press on one part of the foot and the fingers on the opposite side would move.

It was fascinating and we filmed it. While we were filming it Jimmy complained that I was pressing too hard, another anomaly. It hurt below the break.

Bottom line we had the same effect on two paraplegics only their crossover went from one foot to the other. We worked with paralysis for quite awhile but actually achieved more results with Jimmy. He was able to recover bowel and bladder control, a lot of body sensations like heat/cold and some pressure. He was able to switch to a manual chair from an electric. We were teary eyed when he wrote us a letter unaided by any device.

The two paraplegics never had a bladder infection the whole time we worked on them and maintain a certain amount of muscle tone. They both went on to get married.

We always wondered if we could have helped Christopher Reeves. But it was impossible to reach him.

The key to the effect we observed was the eye/ear area. For some reason it triggered this "crossover effect" and it seemed to have a profound effect on them as well.