🐎🦉
Speaking of numb bears...My buddy Kyle getting things done in 2000.
Bear Story - Pain in the Neck
Unbearable aches sends grizzly to chiropractor
by Ray Ring - Chronicle Staff Writer
How do you treat a 700 pound grizzly bear who gets a pain in his neck so bad that his head hangs sideways with the muscles locked tight in spasm?
The same way you might treat a human with the same problem.
Call the chiropractor.
"I applied a thrust to bring it back into alignment," says Kyle Goltz, a chiropractor in West Yellowstone who recently treated a grizzly bear of such magnitude for neck pain.
One thing that made treatment somewhat easier was that the chiropractor didn't have to chase down the grizzly in the wild.
This particular grizzly is named Fred - one of the eight bears in captivity and on display for tourists at the town's Grizzly Discovery Center.
Fred, aged 10, was brought to the center seven years ago from Alaska, where he had been corrupted by too much contact with people and wildlife officials had decided he needed a different kind of home.
Fred's neck pain developed in early May, likely because the bears at the center "play pretty hard," rough housing in the enclosure, says Gayle Ford, a veterinarian and the center's executive director. "They swim, they roll each other on their backs, they do every contact sport."
Fred showed stiffness in his neck, then began to act lathargic, with his head tilted to one side. Antibiotics were tried, then it was decided that for a diagnosis, Fred needed X-rays.
Easier said than done. Even captive grizzlies are fairly wild.
Ford had to sedate Fred for the crosstown journey to the X-ray machine at the town's medical clinic. She used a blowgun and dart which causes less trauma than a rifle shooting darts.
With the blowgun, "You have to get within 30 to 40 feet to make the shot, and make sure you're not shooting into the wind," she says.
Chiropractor Goltz, called in to do his thing, began feeling the bear's neck as the bear was going under sedation.
"Just by feeling, we could tell there was quite a bit of muscle spasm going on - the muscle feels really hard, just like on a human," Goltz says.
Goltz, who started practicing in West Yellowstone in March, already had a bit of experience working on non-human patients. He'd worked on a rear leg of a dog, the middle back of a cat and assisted another chiropractor working on a horse's neck.
But Fred was his first bear, which presented challenges.
"There's so much muscle mass," Goltz said.
Once knocked out, with numerous center staffers doing the heavy lifting, Fred got a ride on a specially built stretcher into the clinic, where physician's assistant John Lewis and his staff donated their services.
"Fred was also the first bear I've treated," Lewis says.
They took X-rays and determined that the bear's fourth cervical vertebrae was out of alignment.
"It was pretty clear - it was twisted to one side," Goltz says. "A bear's anatomy, including the spine, is very close to a human's."
So they brought Fred back to the Grizzly Discovery Center, injected him with muscle relaxers and the chiropractor tried a few moves as the bear continued to sleep.
"I worked on him a little bit trying to loosen him up," Goltz says. "I tried to adjust him. He was on his back and I was on his side and with help of another person, I applied a thrust to bring (the neck vertebrae) back into alignment."
"It was quite an experience," Goltz says.
As the chiropractor basically hugged Fred's furry neck, the bear "was breathing deep - his mouth would wrinkle a little bit now and then."
The chiropractor also uses a special gun of his own, which he calls "an activator" - a mechanical spring-loaded device that "speed-pushes the bone," he says - to give Fred two or three good thumps.
The effect? "There was no audible pop or click or release, but to me it was apparent (afterward) he had a lot more movement in the joint," Goltz says.
The treatment was performed two weeks ago. Since then, Fred has been up and about and has been fed continued muscle relaxers in treats such as peanut butter.
This week, due to the combination of treatments and Ford's continued attention, Fred has begun to improve noticeably, Ford says.
"We've really seen some marked improvement in the last several days," Ford says. "He's doing quite well."
Deb Johnson of the West Yellowstone News contributed to this story.
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