Slip Disc Treatment

 After falling through too many point-to-point fences when I was younger, I had to give up horse-riding because of sciatica and take up golf instead. I’m not sure whether it has anything to do with golf, I think maybe it’s the geological age I’ve spent pecking at office computers, but I now suffer from a different kind of back-pain, not the shooting, nervy kind, more the seized-up sort, particularly behind my shoulder-blades. I’ve tried chiro-this and acu-that, but nobody in the UK has been able

Today my husband and I played a leisurely and sunny round at one of Kuala Lumpur’s golf courses before returning to our hotel, the Maya. I unreservedly recommend this place. The moment you enter the “lobby”, your stress levels drop. Not just because the air-con generates a summer breeze instead of the Siberian chill that too many other hotels embrace, but because of the laid-back ambience. Open-plan and intimate, the Maya charms the eye with bewitching flourishes like the corkscrew staircase, reflecting ponds and a super-comfy-sofa-paved Martini bar that my grandson described as “well chilled-out”.

The Maya appears determined to corner the boutique, Bohemian end of the five-star market. Oh to move in.

My husband and I felt so virtuous in having forgone the use of a buggy that we felt justified in rewarding ourselves with some additional calories in the hotel’s restaurant, which has an unusually good menu for the health-conscious. My husband really wanted a special dispensation from his necessarily strict dietary regime in order to try the sticky toffee pudding, of which he is particularly fond and of which he used to consume fair quantities. He kept looking at me with pleading-puppy eyes, whilst extolling the virtues of his favourite dessert and bemoaning the fact that his diet doesn’t allow it more than once a week. Honestly, you should have seen him, how could I not give in, especially after I had won at golf? After teasing him for a bit I decided to abandon my diet police job for once and let him order his favourite dessert. Then I helped him to keep to his diet by eating half of the pudding, which was divine.

We enjoyed a lazy dip in the pool and then I read my book whilst my husband and son played games in the pool with my grandchildren. When the children went off for their nap and my husband fell asleep on his lounger I decided to escape from the snoring (I feel 8 hours a day of that is quite sufficient) by checking out the hotel spa to see if it had anything that could help my back.

My pampering session unfolded at the spa that sets out its stall through its name: “Anggun”, the Malay for “elegance”. Starting out in the shower, I gingerly pointed the head of the hose at my feet and, twisting a lever, got a bit of a shock by accidentally triggering a thunderously hair-parting blast from the fixed showerhead above.

The pummelling was a nice change compared with the feeble lukewarm dribble delivered by other hotel showers. My subsequent 10-minute steam bath was pleasant but made me puff, maybe unsurprisingly as I am a retirement refugee from a country where the prevalent vapour is freezing fog.

A little while later, my masseuse Atiqah heated up some stones in a rice cooker and then strategically applied them to my back. No, this was not some bizarre form of torture worthy of the Aztecs but “hot stone massage”.

According to my later “research” (ie googling), the heat from the stones works wonders, unwinding muscles, boosting blood flow to the zones under attention and releasing toxins, while the client experiences a sensation of calm.

If a stone, which should be made of river-smoothed, iron-rich, heat-retaining basalt, burns a bit, relax. “Fortunately, the human body has an excellent temperature gauge and a client in most cases will and should immediately respond in a negative way to an excessively hot stone, which tells the therapist to remove the stone,” my Google guide says.

Aside from an initial wince-triggering sting, my hot stone session was torment-free. Nonetheless, I did not feel all that wowed.

Atiqah said that a deep tissue massage would do more good. Thankfully the stones, which are sleek, black and about the size of a cell phone battery, merely represented components of the warm-up routine, which then gave way to hard thumb action, triggering waves of shooting, soothing pain.

As her thumbs traced arcs and touched nerves, I was glad that Atiqah could not see my face distort – the slightly comical contortions, which I could see reflected in the highly polished floorboards, were reserved for my viewing only. I suppressed the urge to say “ouch”, since the agony must be beneficial. Also, I have suffered more under the hands of certain UK practitioner who, after yanking your fingers from their sockets, kneel on your spine and attempt to drag your feet up over your shoulders in some sort of wrestling/yoga crossover.

Atiqah kept rubbing my muscles, which had more knots than my stomach before a public speaking bout, and smeared almond oil into the skin. During the process, something strange happened. No, my chakras did not start to hum. Nor was I overcome by a wave of euphoria.

Instead, a conversation between Atiqah and me kicked in. Amazing. Until now, when beached on a lounger, I have rarely mustered more than a grunt.

Dialogue is hard because, for a start, you are usually facing the floor and do not know the therapist’s first language. For another, it is hard to sustain a stream of words unbroken by “oohs” and “aahs” of pain or relief.

According to Atiqah, Malaysians fail to take care of their bodies at all, which is why so many keel over at 50. I can believe it. Whenever I walk into a KL café and ask for a low-fat version of something, I get an even more bewildered look than when I tell a shopkeeper I need no plastic bag. The hassle is almost enough to make you go with the flow, forget your figure and drain a plastic vat of the local blue-coral yogurt bubble tea.

At Anggun, the tea served is that byword for energy, ginger freshly made from the root, rather than in a sachet, and dispensed in a cup the size of a shot glass. With its peppery aftertaste still on my lips, I hopped in the lift.

Atiqah’s parting advice was to drink lots of water to release trapped toxins. I already knew I should do this, in fact it must be the only piece of advice that all the health and diet experts agree on. It is so annoying and confusing that they disagree on absolutely everything else. Diet is the third subject I know of, along with politics and religion, where there is a complete lack of consensus. I can understand why people might not be able to agree on religion due to the tricky issue of the afterlife, as nobody expressing an opinion is currently dead, so knows for sure the answer. With politics, I can see that people will never agree, as the haves and the have-not-as-muchs will always have different ideas on wealth division. But diet? Surely our scientists could figure out the definitive answers to what is good for us and what is not? Maybe the best minds in the scientific community find this subject uninteresting.

Postscript. My back pain has finally been fixed. We stayed at the Maya for four more days and I went back every day for a massage. Each time Atiqah found the knots in my back and applied herself vigorously and painfully to them. After five sessions they were virtually gone. What took me ages to figure out was why. Atiqah is a very good masseuse, but I’d had lots of good massages before, which had not cured the problem. I think the reason she was able to fix my back was that I had five sessions on five consecutive days. My muscle knots weren’t given long enough between sessions to seize up again, so each massage session could build on the progress made in the prior session, rather than starting from scratch. So my advice to anyone with a problem with muscular knots is to find a good masseuse, tell her that you can put up with pain, then go back four times on the following four days. It’s surely got to be worth a try, hasn’t it?

Whilst in Thailand, why not visit one of the country’s currently best three beach destinations:

Koh Lao Liang: http://www.andamanadventures.com/kohlaoliang.shtml

Ao Nang: http://www.andamanadventures.com/ao_nang.shtml

Railay/Tonsai: http://www.andamanadventures.com/railay-tonsai.shtml

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Eileen Roberts

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