Muntathar “Mun”Altaii was just 17 years old and on the cusp of graduating from high school when a debilitating back injury literally left him wanting to die.
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It happened in the spring of 2015, as he was doing something as mundane as pulling out a tree root. For most people his age, back injuries resolve themselves after a few days of rest and some ice packs, but for Mun, the pain was unrelenting. The injury left him in severe pain and hunched over, barely able to walk and with a growing numbness in his right leg.
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After being turned away by multiple doctors in the U.S. and three months of continuing pain, he got in touch with Australian chiropractor Dr. Ian Rossborough who works at Chiropractic Excellence, a clinic just south of Melbourne.
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It’s painful just watching him shuffle into the office that first day; he’s so obviously in excruciating pain, doubled over. Dr. Ian has to guide him down the hallway toward the X-ray room. The injury, the results reveal, damaged the nerves and discs in his spinal cord, and he’s diagnosed with extreme kyphosis or forward rounding of the back. It’s most commonly seen in the elderly, but remember, Mun is just 17 and still has his whole life ahead of him.
As he lays flat on his stomach, Dr. Ian performs a Mr. Miyagi-like “small correction.” And that’s the first step in what turns out to be nothing short of a miraculous recovery!
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Just as Dr. Ian had predicted, Mun still walks pretty severely bent over, at least by normal standards. But he’s visibly walking better than before, and that’s after just one adjustment. And just 10 minutes earlier, when Dr. Ian probed his foot to check for sensation, he’d had no feeling.
After the treatment, he feels those pinpricks, at least some of them. At this rate, he’ll be marching tall and proud at graduation to accept his diploma!
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In the following days, Dr. Ian does just two more adjustments, the first on his neck to take some of the pressure off the nerves, and the second to help stabilize his spine.
That final adjustment came on his seventh day at the clinic, and up to that point, Mun was in so much pain and so embarrassed by his condition that he says, “I didn’t even want to live anymore.”
But that’s all changed now, and by his tenth day, he’s almost entirely standing straight and he starts taking his first normal steps in months!
And two months after that…
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Goal set, goal achieved (even if it meant a roughly 16,000-mile round-trip)!
If you’ve ever suffered a back injury of your own, you know the toll it takes on your everyday life for days, weeks, even years. It’s no fun to wake up and wince first thing in the morning or having to strain to bend down and pick something up. But to have pain so severe that you spend months hunched over, barely able to walk, and would rather die than spend the rest of your life like that? We’re so glad Mun found Dr. Ian when he did, and that thanks to his skills, he was able to march across that stage with more confidence than he’d had in months.
Watch his incredible transformation in the video below, and share to spread happiness that he’s able to live a full and productive life now.
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