Walking without a cane after three weeks in Taipei

I had used a cane for six years. It started after a fall on an icy step, and somewhere along the way it stopped being temporary. My doctor at home called the stoop in my back normal for my age. I suppose it was. I just did not want normal.

My grandson took a photo of me at his graduation, and I did not recognise the bent woman in it. That was the week I called CuraMosaic.

Why bone setting

I had never heard of bone setting. The coordinator explained that in Taiwan it is a family trade, passed from parent to child, and that the clinic she had in mind had treated patients for four generations.

She also told me plainly that if my scans showed severe osteoporosis, they would not take me. They asked for a bone density scan before anything was booked. Mine came back fine for my age, and three weeks later I was on a plane to Taipei.

Slow hands

The practitioner was a quiet man in his fifties who had trained under his father. He watched me walk up and down the room twice, then spent a long time with his hands on my back without doing anything I could feel. Then he began.

Nothing was forced. He moved my spine a little at a time, and after each adjustment he massaged the muscles around it until they let go. In some sessions I heard a soft click. In most I did not. I left each one feeling slightly taller, and by the end of the second week I had gained almost an inch.

“I stand straighter than I have in twenty years.”

Hot springs and tea

Between sessions my companion took me up to Beitou, where the hot springs are. Two nights there were the best sleep I have had in years. We also spent an afternoon in a tea house in Maokong, looking down at the city in the rain.

On the last morning I walked out to breakfast and realised I had left the cane in my room. I went back for it, then decided not to.

A year later

I still have the cane. It lives in the hall closet. I do the stretches I was given and I walk every day. My posture is not perfect, but the woman in my photos looks like me again.