Releasing the body's stress

Body Stress Release, a therepeutic body wellness system pioneered by Cape-based husband and-wife team Gail and Ewald Meggersee, is now being practised in Edinburgh by Kerry Teakle.

The complementary health technique is the result of years of research by chiropractor Ewald Meggersee, motivated by his own history of ill health and a lack of help from conventional therapies. Fear of becoming totally paralysed while still in his 30s led Meggersee, together with his wife Gail, to pioneer the body-wellness system known as Body Stress Release (BSR).

"I had the distorted posture of a 120-year-old and would frequently wake up paralysed from the waist down," says Meggersee. "And all my life - from the age of five when I fell out of a tree and lay unconscious for a week - no one had been able to find the source of the continuous shooting pains and cramping I suffered in my lower back and legs."

Meggersee, a qualified industrial chemist, met and married Gail, a teacher. "Eventually it got so bad that I faced losing my job and spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair. We felt we had nothing to lose, so we decided to pack up everything and both train as chiropractors in America.

"During our studies there we had the good fortune to meet Dr Richard van Rumpt, a retired chiropractor who had researched an approach completely different to chiropractic manipulation," says Meggersee. "He talked about listening to the body and using it as a biofeedback mechanism that would be self-healing. When we returned to South Africa, we built on his method of reading the body's feedback response to areas of muscle stress and contraction. The technique became known as Body Stress Release.

"What we discovered is that the body protects itself from stress in a highly organised way. Although it can normally adapt to the various stresses and strains of everyday life - falls, jerks, heavy lifting, bad posture - if the stress gets too severe, the body suffers overload and locks the stress into itself in lines of tension and contraction. This tension - or body stress - leads to pain, numbness or stiffness. It also interferes with the body's self-healing defence mechanisms. The body is less and less able to cope with or adapt to added stress, and begins to deteriorate further. This is why a person with long-term body stress may also feel tense, tired, and lacking in energy and enthusiasm for life. Headaches, backache and indigestion may follow."

Thousands of South Africans beat a path to the Meggersees' door as word spread of his practice in Cape Town in the 1980s. Many of their clients had tried other traditional avenues of medical and chiropractic treatment without success. The Meggersees' gentle, almost miraculous way of enhancing the body's own healing powers by releasing long-held stress locked in the muscle system seemed to the revolutionary therapy they had been waiting for.

The BSR system differs radically from its chiropractic roots. "BSR differs from chiropractics in that it uses information provided by the body itself to determine where abnormal muscle tension is undermining the efficiency of the nervous system and disturbing its ability to co-ordinate its functioning."

UK practitioner Kerry Teakle was intrigued and amazed by this home-grown therapy she learned from the Megersees - who are now teaching others how to practise it - and and decided to bring it to the UK. Teakle is the first practitioner in Scotland, and one of only 12 in the UK. She explains what benefits patients can expect: "People with body stress may be experiencing a range of conditions from backaches, headaches, migraines, sciatica, tiredness, pins and needles in the limbs and generally not feeling 100%.

"Body Stress Release is such a gentle technique that it is suitable for a newborn baby, who may have body stress as a result of the birth process to the elderly, whether sick or healthy."

Body Stress Relief is based on reading the body's response to areas of muscle stress and contraction. Kerrt Teakle (above) practises BSR at Medicalternative in Edinburgh's West End on Monday and Thursday from 47 pm. If you are interested in finding out more, call 0131557 5411 or 0780 110 3528. For more information see www.bodystressrelease-uk.co.uk.