The skull and the other vertebrae rotate and tip to compensate for rotation and tip in C1. The head weighs between 8 and 14 pounds, and, if it is not sitting straight on top of the spine, the muscles of the body must do something to counteract this bowling ball hanging off to the side. I went to Farmington, New Mexico, a town of 40,000 near the four corners area, to view this procedure, as there are no practitioners of it within hundreds of miles of my Boulder, Colorado, home. Lloyd Pond, D.C., who practices with his son, Lonnie, is recognized among those who follow the subject as one of the leading practitioners of upper cervical technique. It measures the degree of vertical pelvic tilt, pelvic rotation in a horizontal plane, the lean of the spinal column at the shoulder level, and the amount of weight the patient carries on each foot.
Patients first lie flat on a table to have leg-length differences measured.
A heat-sensing probe is passed up the spine on the back of the neck. Prior to the cervical adjustment, the graph shows large surface-temperature variations on either side of the spine, indicating interrupted nerve supply. The adjustment direction is based on X rays, which one of the Ponds takes to ensure accuracy. Patient position and distance to the lens is precisely set in each of three different X-ray angles. On a light board, lines are drawn on the X rays through a series of bone points.