These articles by Kathleen McGinn Spring, Jamie Saxon, and Barbara Fox were prepared for the June 21, 2006 issue of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Alternative Approach To Chronic Back Pain
Story teller Susan Danoff has had chronic problems with muscle spasms for most of her life. "When I was a little girl, it was a stiff neck," she says. "I couldn't turn my head." The attacks came on with no warning, and were triggered by the simplest thing - bending down to pick something off the floor, catching a falling pot.
Her first health practitioner was her mother, who gave her asprin and a compress. When she was a child, the spasms lasted for a few days. "When I got older, they hung on longer," she says. "It could be totally debillitating."
The worst attack came in the fall of 2004. "That bout lasted five months," she says. Unable to tolerate drugs, she was in pain all of the time. The spasm sapped her of energy, and made her favorite physical activity - walking her two dogs - completely impossible. Driving was difficult and uncomfortable, but Danoff did continue with her work.
A native of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Danoff earned a degree in East Asian studies from Princeton University in 1975 - with the third class to include women. She then spent a year teaching in Taiwan with Princeton in Asia. Quickly deciding that teaching was the career for her, Danoff earned a teaching certificate at the University of California at Berkeley and then a master's degree in English at Rutgers.
But it was a chance encounter at the Princeton Public Library that set her career course. "I saw a story teller there in 1979," she recalls. She knew right away that she wanted to combine story telling with teaching. "I was interested in it as a teaching art," she says. She worked on her story telling skills and repertoire while teaching writing part time at Princeton University for nine years. All the while, she was looking for work as a story teller.
"When you're developing a career no one has heard of, it's hard to get work," she says. But she persevered, first getting work from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, where she worked for five years in the early 1980s, and also performing on her own and making tapes. "In the process," she says, "I learned that story telling is an incredible vehicle for teaching urban children."
She began to pursue contracts with urban schools for year-long story telling programs, and in 1996 founded Storytelling Arts, a non-profit that now has enough work to keep 10 contract employees busy in schools around the state.
Danoff was able to keep Storytelling Arts going during her latest - and possibly last - bout with muscle spasms, but it wasn't easy. "I was at my wits end," she says. A chiropractor she had been seeing was out of town, so she went to another chiropractor. Her condition got no better. Then her trusted chiropractor returned. She thought she would get relief at last, but he was unable to help her. The spasm lifted, but quickly came back.
Next she turned to her primary care physician, suggesting that it was time for tests - perhaps a CAT scan or an MRI. But her doctor was quite sure that the problem was not skeletal, but was indeed muscular. He gave her the name of an alternative medicine practitioner, Lucero Mejia, a Lawrenceville resident who performs MAT - muscle activation techniques.
With nothing to lose, Danoff went to see Mejia, and is sure that she will never have serious problems with spasms again. Explaining just what MAT is, Danoff says "It's totally different from chiropractic. That's bones, this is muscles. It's not massage. It's very scientific. She locates where the muscle is weak and contacts that muscle." Each muscle is tested to see just where the weakness is. Practitioners of MAT believe that spasms occur because the muscle is no longer communicating properly with the brain. They restore the connection through muscle manipulation.
"It's totally pain free," says Danoff. It is also meant to be permanent. "This is not therapy where she wants you to come back," she says. "She wants you to be healed, and not come back." The therapy generally occurs over about four sessions, but Danoff's treatment took longer because she had had such severe spasms for so long. She was also given isometric exercises to do at home, and, as a next step, she says that she will probably go back to Mejia, who is also a personal trainer, for a course of strength-building exercises.
At the moment, Danoff is enjoying her new pain-free life, her work, and her family. Her husband, Neal Tolchin, is an English professor at Hunter, and her son, Jonah Tolchin, just graduated from the eighth grade at the Princeton Friends School. Her dogs, a golden retriever and a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, are getting a lot more walks now, and she is full of energy as she prepares to promote her first book, "The Golden Thread: Storytelling in Teaching and Learning."
In her own life, the golden thread was the one that led her, after a lifetime of pain, to Lucero Mejia.
Lucero Mejia, MAT therapist, says that Susan Danoff is the most challenging person I have ever had," says Lucero Mejia. "I put stress on individual muscles," she says of the muscle activation technique (MAT) she practices, "but I couldn't put much stress on her. She was too weak." When Danoff first came to her, Mejia recalls thinking "I don't know how she's getting better."
A case of mononucleosis Danoff suffered while in her 20s contributed to the weakness, in Mejia's opinion. "With mono - and with Lyme disease - you become weak," she says.
But Danoff, after a five-month seige with muscle spasms, did respond to the MAT therapy, and now, nearly two years after working with Mejia, is confident that she will no longer be bothered by the condition.
Mejia speaks about MAT just three days before she is due to fly to Denver for further training in the technique. To become certified she completed a 17-month internship in 2003, spending one week each month in Denver, learning the technique developed by Greg Roskoph, biomechanics trainer for the Denver Broncos, Denver Nuggets, and Utah Jazz pro sports teams.
MAT, as explained on www.resistancetrainingspecialist.com/mat, is "a unique and practical approach to evaluating and dealing with neuromuscular imbalances that contribute to dysfunction and ultimately to injury. The MAT system provides trainers with the necessary skills needed to treat neuromuscular inhibition and the resulting tension/protective mechanisms in the antagonists that will restrict range of motion."
Like Danoff, Mejia has crafted her own career. A native of Colombia who immigrated at age 18, her first job in this country was fielding directory assistance calls for AT&T. Her reaction to her first job was: "I can't take the abuse of these customers. I have to get an education." She first attended Mercer County Community College, and then earned a finance degree summa cum laude from Rider University. By furthering her education, she was able to move up in the ranks of AT&T, specializing in marketing, and coming within a stone's throw of upper management. But after some 15 years with the organization she began to question her life's work.
"In 1995 I realized I had a house, a car, materialistic things, and I asked `Should I climb the ladder, or do something else?' I asked `If I had all the money in the world, what would I do?'"
The answer went back to a life-long pre-occupation. "A little on the heavy side" as a youngster, Mejia had been interested in fitness and nutrition all of her life. At a career crossroad, she decided that "by 2000 I will be a fitness guru." She began holding personal training sessions in her home gym, and doing fitness career research.
When AT&T offered her a buy-out in 1998, she quickly decided to "take the money and run." She then earned a fitness and nutrition diploma from the International Correspondence School in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Next was an ohashiatsu certificate from the Ohashi Institute in New York City.
As her personal training and nutrition practice grew, Mejia was frustrated to find that her clients were getting hurt, and were having trouble healing and getting back to their sports. It was then that she heard about MAT, which preaches that biomechanical imbalances lead to injuries. She now incorporates MAT into her practice.
The mother of two sons, one about to become a Lawrence policeman and the other a senior at Harvard, Mejia, who is married to Jorge Mejia, a chemical and environmental engineer about to start a new job with Merck, says she is "super fit."
And while Danoff's case presented her biggest challenge, perhaps the best advertisement for her brand of alternative medicine is her father. Along with her mother, he had business and real estate interests in Colombia, and worked as an accountant after immigrating. "I changed his nutrition, and he is very healthy," says Mejia of her dad, who is close to his 94th birthday.
- Kathleen McGinn Spring
This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com -- the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.