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Increasingly, energy practitioners are seeking to unwind deep-rooted core distortions in the spinal structures of their patients. Cate Montana investigates.
When Paul Lamb, LMT, Quantum-Touch practitioner, medical qigong therapist and reflexologist first learned about core distortion—tipping of the sacrum (the base of the spine, which connects to the back of the pelvis) and forward or backward rotation of the ilium (the large broad bone forming the upper part of each half of the pelvis) leading to a lack of weight-bearing support for the spine—he wasn’t overly impressed. 
And then he treated a 72-year-old friend for it.
“All of her life, one leg had been shorter than the other—a classic symptom of core distortion,” says Lamb, who practices in New Jersey. “Her mother used to make her pants longer on one side to compensate. I began the core distortion protocol by measuring the height of her occipital bone (a trapezoid-shaped bone at the back of the skull) on both sides of her head, and the measurements were quite off. Then, when I got down to measuring the height of her hips, it was like ‘Holy mackerel! Man, was she off!’”
Lamb treated her for core distortion, and when he measured her again, both her occipital bone and her hips measured evenly. “I was quite impressed,” he says. “I asked her how she felt during the adjustment, and she said she didn’t feel anything—which is not unusual. Some people really notice the adjustment, but others do not. She also didn’t notice much when I had her walk around to see how—or if—her gait was changed afterwards. But she called me when she went to her chiropractor some time later. She’d been seeing him for 20 years, and when he looked at her he said ‘Your legs and hips are even! What did you do?’”
Next, Lamb worked on a 78-year-old gentleman whose doctors were telling him he’d need to have a hip replacement. He’d been having difficulty walking, and getting in and out of chairs was very painful for him. Lamb treated the client for core distortion, and right away he had no problem walking or getting in and out of a chair. “He felt the shift immediately,” says Lamb. “Everything was clear. I was really impressed.” 
A common denominatorCore distortion is a spiral “twist” that runs from the top of the head to the feet, affecting the entire structure of the body and causing musculoskeletal dysfunction and pain. The condition is related to a wide variety of functional disorders, from temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ) to scoliosis, carpel tunnel syndrome to fibromyalgia. 
Indicators are a high left shoulder and lower right shoulder, with one shoulder rotated forward  (anteriorly) and the other rotated toward the back (posteriorly). The rib cage will be tipped down on the right, the left ilium will be rotated forward and the right ilium will be rotated backward. The left leg will become functionally longer, and the extra leg length is absorbed by the right hip, which will be rotated toward the back as well.
“I was seeing a lot of clients with very different problems,” says Don McCann, MA, LMT, LMHC, founder of Structural Energetic Therapy® in Lutz, Florida, and the discoverer of core distortion. “What I noticed was that whether it was whiplash or a knee or hip issue or carpal tunnel, when I looked at their body structure I could see there was a kind of collapse that was directly related to what the problem was. There was always a shoulder higher, a knee hyperextended and turned out. 
“And when I looked at the body with people standing up, I could see a spiral distortion from the top of their head down to their feet, with the hip tipped to one side forward. Even their faces were distorted. On the left side the sphenoid bone, a butterfly-shaped bone in the middle of the skull toward the front, was down, and on the right side it was tipped up. You could see a corresponding difference in the alignment of the cheekbones and the jaw line.”
McCann started to notice the same spiral torsion pattern in everyone he treated. Additionally, he discovered that there were dramatic weaknesses in the muscles involved in the distortion—about a 50 percent loss of muscle strength overall. 
It kicked off a medical investigation that was to last him decades. Because it involved the legs, pelvis, spine, thorax and cranium—basically the core of every client—McCann chose to call the condition core distortion. 
“I had a name for it but I didn’t have a solution,” he says. “Some osteopaths told me that it’s a ‘normal distortion.’ But I was seeing that the collapse within this curvature is where people’s pain was coming from. It was why a knee was wearing out, or a disc, a hip. I thought, if I’m going to rehabilitate people, I’ve got to figure out how to permanently shift the twist so that there is proper weight-bearing support for the spine.”
What really shocked him was discovering that apparently most, if not all, children are born with the condition. Recorded measurements of the pelvic angles in infants up to 1 year of age show an average 20° difference between the right and left ilium, with the left ilium rotated forward and the right ilium rotated backward.1 
“It’s clear that normal children are born with the core distortion, creating imbalances and weakness throughout the body,” says McCann. “The injuries, stresses and developmental patterns that occur throughout their lives result in further collapse, creating musculoskeletal problems.”
As McCann worked out the connections between the cranium, especially the sphenoid and occipital bones of the skull (see right), and the hips, pelvis and sacrum, he learned how to permanently unwind the body’s twist, and was rewarded with dramatic results in his clients. 
“Some of the stories are almost too good to be true,” he says. “One of the more impressive was a 53-year-old woman who had a severe low back injury. She was a marathon runner and had been doing Ironman events in Hawaii from age 33 to the present. She was told she had to go home and no longer run anymore, and that she would have to have surgery on a disc in her low back as well as a hip replacement. 
“After just having the core distortion worked on and three pelvic balances, which is myofascial soft tissue work in the affected area, she was able to resume training for the next race, which was only six weeks away. When she came to see us afterward, she proudly told us she had shaved something like 15 minutes off of her personal best time in Hawaii—a record set when she was 35 years old.”
Why did she perform so much better 20 years later? McCann says one of the reasons is that some muscles were not available to her, and overall her muscle strength had been running at about 50 percent capacity all of her life because of the core distortion. “Once we cleared that up, we got pressure off the disc so she could run, and overall her muscle strength improved so her total performance came up higher.”
So why has Mother Nature done such a poor job of things in giving us this unpleasant twist? Why are babies born with core distortion? According to McCann, one theory is an incomplete evolution of the naked ape. Apparently, the way a chimpanzee strolls out on the savannah, a natural torsion of the ilium and the body helps them walk the way they walk. 
When Homo australopithicus started standing upright, walking on two legs, the theory goes that we still kept some of that chimpanzee torsion in our bodies. Basically, evolution hasn’t quite caught on to the fact that we’re now a purely bipedal species. 
Quantum-TouchQuantum-Touch stimulates the body’s capacity to heal itself through a practitioner’s use of intention, body energy awareness and breath work. Quantum-Touch founder Richard Gordon developed the practice based on techniques originated in the late 1970s by Bob Rasmussen, a hands-on healer. 
Foundational to the Quantum-Touch technique is the understanding that it is not the practitioner doing the healing, but rather the recipient. “Given the right energetic, emotional, nutritional and spiritual environments, the natural state of the body is perfect health or homeostasis,” says Richard Gordon, author of Quantum-Touch 2.0: The New Human (North Atlantic Books, 2013). “The body has an extraordinary intelligence and ability to heal itself. Our favorite definition of a healer is someone who was sick and got well. A great healer is someone who was very sick and got well quickly.”
In the world of quantum physics, all energy is the same. The life force found in all human beings is the same life force energy found in a dog, a plant or an amoeba. In the world of Quantum-Touch, all healing is self-healing. Practitioners can assist other people to heal simply by directing life energy from the Earth into their heart chakra and then to the client. The client and the client’s body do the real work of using that life force energy to make the corrections in the body that are needed to heal.
According to Gordon, the operative scientific principles in play that enable Quantum-Touch to work are resonance and entrainment. Place a bunch of pendulum clocks together in a room, and before long they will all be synchronized. As any musician knows, if you pluck a G string on an instrument such as a harp, the G string on another instrument in the room will start to vibrate sympathetically in resonant union. 
It is much the same in physics, where entrainment theory dictates that two objects, each vibrating at a different speed, will start to vibrate at the same speed when energy is transferred between them. 
According to Quantum-Touch theory, energy directed from the heart (the “H” string) is a high vibrational life-force energy that the recipient’s body can use to correct pain, stress, inflammation or disease, entraining that area to the correct frequency needed to heal.
Unwinding the core distortionFounder of Structural Energetic Therapy® Don McCann uses the following technique for correcting core distortion. 
“I take hold of the cranium in the sphenoid occipital hold—one hand holding the wings of the sphenoid at the temples and the other hand holding across the ridge of the occiput at the back of
the head. 
“I then take them into a left torsion movement, releasing the left sphenoid by lifting on that wing of the sphenoid while pressing down on the right side, meanwhile lifting the ridge of the occiput up on the right and pressing down on the left. Then I’ll take the client through all six of the cranial motions that can be taking place at the sphenoid. 
“If I don’t unwind the torsion out of every one of those motions, it won’t be a long-term fix. If I do get those unwound, then we get a full unwinding of all the other cranial bones that are associated with core distortion, and we get a long-term correction.
“It’s not that these bones are out of place so much as they are restricted. It’s really a matter of getting the soft tissue to release them so they can work in balance.” 
Here is Paul Lamb’s description of using Quantum-Touch to address the same condition.
“First of all, I take measurements of the occipital bone at the back of the skull. I measure to see if one side is higher than the other. Then I get down on one knee and I measure the hips to see if one hip is higher than the other. Then I have the client stand in front of me. I ask them to close their eyes and relax. Then I look right at their face and beneath their face to the sphenoid bone in the skull. I establish the intention to restore balance and harmony in the sphenoid bone, in the occipital bone and throughout the body.
“Using my body awareness and breath awareness, I focus on drawing energy into my body, direct the energy to my heart area, raising the frequency of the energy to a very high level. Then I exhale, directing the energy from the heart to the client. The client’s body knows what to do from that point on.”

​A simpler unwinding So far, no clinical studies have been done to validate the existence of core distortion or measure the effectiveness of the unwinding technique McCann has developed. But anecdotal healing stories abound. And there have been numerous different approaches developed to heal the condition, the most notable of which is Quantum-Touch—the “hands off” technique that Lamb uses with all his clients when addressing core distortion, including both the clients mentioned above. Quantum-Touch, developed by Richard Gordon, an early pioneer in the field of energy medicine, is a healing method that works with the life force energy of the body (also known as qi or ‘chi’ in Chinese and prana in Sanskrit) to promote wellness and reduce pain, correct skeletal misalignments and alleviate the symptoms of chronic disease.  The original Quantum-Touch method consisted of a light touch of the practitioner’s hands on the area to be healed, in conjunction with an appropriate breathing technique and intentional movement of life force energy from the earth to the heart of the practitioner and then directed to the client. About a decade ago, Gordon advanced the technique (which he calls Quantum-Touch 2.0) to a completely hands-off practice like the one Lamb uses. A few studies have investigated the effectiveness of Quantum-Touch. In one, members of the University of California, Santa Cruz men’s basketball team who received Quantum-Touch healing sessions filled out health questionnaires throughout the season.  They reported that pain levels were lower, performances were better, injuries were fewer and the injuries that did occur healed faster. “I’ve never seen anything to compare with the positive results of Quantum-Touch,” confirmed UCSC men’s basketball coach Duane Garner. “It enabled affected members to resume competitive play in a very brief period of time following an injury, and improvement seemed to continue even after the actual therapeutic session.”2 In another study, pain levels decreased significantly for both men and women in the experimental group using Quantum-Touch.3  Richard Gordon teaches practitioners to use the technique specifically for core distortion. “I was absolutely delighted that this technique works so amazingly well on core distortion,” he says. “It showed me something vitally important as a demonstration of the fact that the mind is not confined to the brain, and that we have these abilities that are unknown previously.” Gordon says approximately one in 10 people being treated for core distortion with Quantum-Touch can actually feel the back of the skull moving when the adjustment is made. “Most people don’t feel anything, but some do. And for them it’s sometimes quite dramatic,” he says.  “Resonance and entrainment allow the body to do its own self-healing process. It just looks like we’re healing the other person, but it’s actually their body doing its own self-healing. We hold the field and the energy that allows it to do what it does. It’s like giving gasoline to a car. The gasoline doesn’t make the car run, the engine does. We’re just providing the gasoline so that the system can do what it needs to do to get better.” Core distortion treatment benefits According to Don McCann, founder of Structural Energetic Therapy, after 37 years of work and research, the following are just a few of the health benefits that he attributes to correcting core distortion.  For the professional athlete, after clearing core distortion, peak performance is a true possibility, along with fewer injuries and a longer athletic career. Recovery time from injuries that do occur is minimized, while overall stamina, endurance, strength, flexibility, organ function efficiency and energy are maximized. This goes for non-athletes as well. A partial list of the more than 200 health conditions McCann has found respond well to the balancing of the cranial twist and the core distortion pattern include: scoliosis, neck pain, herniated and bulging discs, shoulder pain, frozen shoulder, degenerative disc disease, arthritis, back pain, sciatic pain, osteoporosis, joint inflexibility, tennis elbow, spinal misalignments, TMJ, whiplash, tendonitis, headaches, fibromyalgia, lupus, plantar fasciitis, hiatal hernias, acid reflux, strains/sprains and carpal tunnel syndrome.  PATIENT STORIES Esther Gerard, 71, New Jersey “I’ve always been very active. In 2004, hiking up a mountain, I took a fall and ended up with a really badly torn meniscus. I went to physical therapy and ended up injuring it even worse and couldn’t do anything with it. I was always in pain and limping. I had trouble going up and down stairs.  “Fourteen years later I went back to physical therapy. They did extensive x-rays and told me it was already bone-on-bone in my knee and that there was nothing they could do except try to strengthen the muscles around my knee, and that eventually my only recourse was surgery.  “The second round of physical therapy didn’t work. At that point I ran into Paul Lamb at an energy fair, and he told me about the work he was doing with Quantum-Touch and core distortion. He described the clearing process and offered to do a treatment, and because nothing else was working I thought, ‘Why not?’
The treatment was very quick and painless, and I walked out pain free. That was in 2019.  “After the treatment I just forgot all about my knee. It didn’t bother me at all. I would even run up the steps. Needless to say, I haven’t been to a doctor about it and have no need of surgery. I’m careful with it just in case. But I’m very excited about the core distortion process and what it did for me.” Colleen Webb, 38, New York “I’ve known Paul for a long time, and over the years he’s been really helpful with health issues. I’ve been having conversations with him about nutrition and supplements for decades. “In 2020 my little boy was two years old and quite big for his age—30 pounds! I was really feeling the effects of having to constantly pick him up and carry him on my hip.  “Paul could tell that I wasn’t standing right and asked if I was feeling okay. When I admitted I was in pain he suggested that he’d do some core distortion work.  “Frankly, I went in with some doubt and skepticism about the kind of energy work involved. He didn’t even touch me during the treatment. I definitely noticed after that treatment, carrying my son on my hip did not cause me the same discomfort that it once had. “Then, a few months ago, I was getting kind of desperate because my shoulders were bothering me (my son is now 40 pounds!) and I was in the middle of a move. I didn’t have time to go see him in person, but I knew he did long-distance healing, so when I asked him is there anything he could do for me, he said, ‘I’ll call you back after I’ve worked on you.’ “A little later I was sitting with my son and, all of a sudden, I felt something change in the way I was feeling. I had this new energy, I felt better and I thought ‘That’s odd.’ And then I got his message that said he’d done the healing.” 
Increasingly, energy practitioners are seeking to unwind deep-rooted core distortions in the spinal structures of their patients. Cate Montana investigates.
When Paul Lamb, LMT, Quantum-Touch practitioner, medical qigong therapist and reflexologist first learned about core distortion—tipping of the sacrum (the base of the spine, which connects to the back of the pelvis) and forward or backward rotation of the ilium (the large broad bone forming the upper part of each half of the pelvis) leading to a lack of weight-bearing support for the spine—he wasn’t overly impressed. 
And then he treated a 72-year-old friend for it.
“All of her life, one leg had been shorter than the other—a classic symptom of core distortion,” says Lamb, who practices in New Jersey. “Her mother used to make her pants longer on one side to compensate. I began the core distortion protocol by measuring the height of her occipital bone (a trapezoid-shaped bone at the back of the skull) on both sides of her head, and the measurements were quite off. Then, when I got down to measuring the height of her hips, it was like ‘Holy mackerel! Man, was she off!’”
Lamb treated her for core distortion, and when he measured her again, both her occipital bone and her hips measured evenly. “I was quite impressed,” he says. “I asked her how she felt during the adjustment, and she said she didn’t feel anything—which is not unusual. Some people really notice the adjustment, but others do not. She also didn’t notice much when I had her walk around to see how—or if—her gait was changed afterwards. But she called me when she went to her chiropractor some time later. She’d been seeing him for 20 years, and when he looked at her he said ‘Your legs and hips are even! What did you do?’”
Next, Lamb worked on a 78-year-old gentleman whose doctors were telling him he’d need to have a hip replacement. He’d been having difficulty walking, and getting in and out of chairs was very painful for him. Lamb treated the client for core distortion, and right away he had no problem walking or getting in and out of a chair. “He felt the shift immediately,” says Lamb. “Everything was clear. I was really impressed.” 
A common denominatorCore distortion is a spiral “twist” that runs from the top of the head to the feet, affecting the entire structure of the body and causing musculoskeletal dysfunction and pain. The condition is related to a wide variety of functional disorders, from temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ) to scoliosis, carpel tunnel syndrome to fibromyalgia. 
Indicators are a high left shoulder and lower right shoulder, with one shoulder rotated forward  (anteriorly) and the other rotated toward the back (posteriorly). The rib cage will be tipped down on the right, the left ilium will be rotated forward and the right ilium will be rotated backward. The left leg will become functionally longer, and the extra leg length is absorbed by the right hip, which will be rotated toward the back as well.
“I was seeing a lot of clients with very different problems,” says Don McCann, MA, LMT, LMHC, founder of Structural Energetic Therapy® in Lutz, Florida, and the discoverer of core distortion. “What I noticed was that whether it was whiplash or a knee or hip issue or carpal tunnel, when I looked at their body structure I could see there was a kind of collapse that was directly related to what the problem was. There was always a shoulder higher, a knee hyperextended and turned out. 
“And when I looked at the body with people standing up, I could see a spiral distortion from the top of their head down to their feet, with the hip tipped to one side forward. Even their faces were distorted. On the left side the sphenoid bone, a butterfly-shaped bone in the middle of the skull toward the front, was down, and on the right side it was tipped up. You could see a corresponding difference in the alignment of the cheekbones and the jaw line.”
McCann started to notice the same spiral torsion pattern in everyone he treated. Additionally, he discovered that there were dramatic weaknesses in the muscles involved in the distortion—about a 50 percent loss of muscle strength overall. 
It kicked off a medical investigation that was to last him decades. Because it involved the legs, pelvis, spine, thorax and cranium—basically the core of every client—McCann chose to call the condition core distortion. 
“I had a name for it but I didn’t have a solution,” he says. “Some osteopaths told me that it’s a ‘normal distortion.’ But I was seeing that the collapse within this curvature is where people’s pain was coming from. It was why a knee was wearing out, or a disc, a hip. I thought, if I’m going to rehabilitate people, I’ve got to figure out how to permanently shift the twist so that there is proper weight-bearing support for the spine.”
What really shocked him was discovering that apparently most, if not all, children are born with the condition. Recorded measurements of the pelvic angles in infants up to 1 year of age show an average 20° difference between the right and left ilium, with the left ilium rotated forward and the right ilium rotated backward.1 
“It’s clear that normal children are born with the core distortion, creating imbalances and weakness throughout the body,” says McCann. “The injuries, stresses and developmental patterns that occur throughout their lives result in further collapse, creating musculoskeletal problems.”
As McCann worked out the connections between the cranium, especially the sphenoid and occipital bones of the skull (see right), and the hips, pelvis and sacrum, he learned how to permanently unwind the body’s twist, and was rewarded with dramatic results in his clients. 
“Some of the stories are almost too good to be true,” he says. “One of the more impressive was a 53-year-old woman who had a severe low back injury. She was a marathon runner and had been doing Ironman events in Hawaii from age 33 to the present. She was told she had to go home and no longer run anymore, and that she would have to have surgery on a disc in her low back as well as a hip replacement. 
“After just having the core distortion worked on and three pelvic balances, which is myofascial soft tissue work in the affected area, she was able to resume training for the next race, which was only six weeks away. When she came to see us afterward, she proudly told us she had shaved something like 15 minutes off of her personal best time in Hawaii—a record set when she was 35 years old.”
Why did she perform so much better 20 years later? McCann says one of the reasons is that some muscles were not available to her, and overall her muscle strength had been running at about 50 percent capacity all of her life because of the core distortion. “Once we cleared that up, we got pressure off the disc so she could run, and overall her muscle strength improved so her total performance came up higher.”
So why has Mother Nature done such a poor job of things in giving us this unpleasant twist? Why are babies born with core distortion? According to McCann, one theory is an incomplete evolution of the naked ape. Apparently, the way a chimpanzee strolls out on the savannah, a natural torsion of the ilium and the body helps them walk the way they walk. 
When Homo australopithicus started standing upright, walking on two legs, the theory goes that we still kept some of that chimpanzee torsion in our bodies. Basically, evolution hasn’t quite caught on to the fact that we’re now a purely bipedal species. 
Quantum-TouchQuantum-Touch stimulates the body’s capacity to heal itself through a practitioner’s use of intention, body energy awareness and breath work. Quantum-Touch founder Richard Gordon developed the practice based on techniques originated in the late 1970s by Bob Rasmussen, a hands-on healer. 
Foundational to the Quantum-Touch technique is the understanding that it is not the practitioner doing the healing, but rather the recipient. “Given the right energetic, emotional, nutritional and spiritual environments, the natural state of the body is perfect health or homeostasis,” says Richard Gordon, author of Quantum-Touch 2.0: The New Human (North Atlantic Books, 2013). “The body has an extraordinary intelligence and ability to heal itself. Our favorite definition of a healer is someone who was sick and got well. A great healer is someone who was very sick and got well quickly.”
In the world of quantum physics, all energy is the same. The life force found in all human beings is the same life force energy found in a dog, a plant or an amoeba. In the world of Quantum-Touch, all healing is self-healing. Practitioners can assist other people to heal simply by directing life energy from the Earth into their heart chakra and then to the client. The client and the client’s body do the real work of using that life force energy to make the corrections in the body that are needed to heal.
According to Gordon, the operative scientific principles in play that enable Quantum-Touch to work are resonance and entrainment. Place a bunch of pendulum clocks together in a room, and before long they will all be synchronized. As any musician knows, if you pluck a G string on an instrument such as a harp, the G string on another instrument in the room will start to vibrate sympathetically in resonant union. 
It is much the same in physics, where entrainment theory dictates that two objects, each vibrating at a different speed, will start to vibrate at the same speed when energy is transferred between them. 
According to Quantum-Touch theory, energy directed from the heart (the “H” string) is a high vibrational life-force energy that the recipient’s body can use to correct pain, stress, inflammation or disease, entraining that area to the correct frequency needed to heal.
Unwinding the core distortionFounder of Structural Energetic Therapy® Don McCann uses the following technique for correcting core distortion. 
“I take hold of the cranium in the sphenoid occipital hold—one hand holding the wings of the sphenoid at the temples and the other hand holding across the ridge of the occiput at the back of
the head. 
“I then take them into a left torsion movement, releasing the left sphenoid by lifting on that wing of the sphenoid while pressing down on the right side, meanwhile lifting the ridge of the occiput up on the right and pressing down on the left. Then I’ll take the client through all six of the cranial motions that can be taking place at the sphenoid. 
“If I don’t unwind the torsion out of every one of those motions, it won’t be a long-term fix. If I do get those unwound, then we get a full unwinding of all the other cranial bones that are associated with core distortion, and we get a long-term correction.
“It’s not that these bones are out of place so much as they are restricted. It’s really a matter of getting the soft tissue to release them so they can work in balance.” 
Here is Paul Lamb’s description of using Quantum-Touch to address the same condition.
“First of all, I take measurements of the occipital bone at the back of the skull. I measure to see if one side is higher than the other. Then I get down on one knee and I measure the hips to see if one hip is higher than the other. Then I have the client stand in front of me. I ask them to close their eyes and relax. Then I look right at their face and beneath their face to the sphenoid bone in the skull. I establish the intention to restore balance and harmony in the sphenoid bone, in the occipital bone and throughout the body.
“Using my body awareness and breath awareness, I focus on drawing energy into my body, direct the energy to my heart area, raising the frequency of the energy to a very high level. Then I exhale, directing the energy from the heart to the client. The client’s body knows what to do from that point on.”