Posture

The specific postures Aajonus returned to throughout his accounts were the plow and spinal twists. He used these himself for years before the Primal Diet resolved his spinal condition to the degree where he no longer required external chiropractic intervention, and he prescribed them to others dealing with back pain, tension, and spinal misalignment.

The plow involves lying on the back, raising the legs and buttocks and back into the air, and then either placing the knees to the ears or extending the toes out to the floor behind the head. He described this clearly enough that he felt confident others could follow it without extensive instruction.

The spinal twist was described in more specific detail. The practitioner lies on the right side of the body, keeping the right leg completely straight and extended. The left leg is then bent at the knee, and the left foot is pressed flat against the right shin just below the right knee. The left shoulder and arm are then moved backward behind the body, twisting the shoulder in the rearward direction. The goal is to keep the left knee pressing down onto the bed or floor while simultaneously attempting to keep the shoulder moving backward. This can be performed on a bed or on the floor.

He was emphatic that these stretches should only be attempted after the back has been thoroughly warmed. The standard instruction was to apply hot water bottles to the painful areas of the back for thirty minutes before attempting the postures, or alternatively to spend thirty minutes in a hot bath first. His reasoning was consistent: muscles and connective tissue that are cold or tense will not yield safely to stretching, and attempting to stretch before adequate heat has been applied risks bruising tissue and causing further damage. The heat causes the muscles to relax, the vertebrae to have more room to shift, and the whole system to become pliable enough for the stretching to accomplish its intended elongation rather than create injury.

He recommended attempting these postures two to five times daily when dealing with spinal pain and tension, always preceded by the thirty-minute heat application.

Hot water bottles and hot baths occupied a central position in his structural and postural protocols. He recommended placing hot water bottles along the spine while in bed, particularly at night, to allow the muscles and connective tissue to relax over a sustained period. When lying on the back or stomach, the hot water bottles should be placed at the sides. When lying on the side, they can be positioned at both the back and stomach.

For situations involving the neck and upper spine, he specified that a hot water bottle should be placed under the armpits rather than directly on the neck. His reasoning was that stimulating the larger lymph glands of the armpit region would allow the lymphatic system to address the neck problem without overburdening the smaller glands of the neck directly, which could lead to further complications including glandular swelling.

The bath protocol for back pain was something he described from direct personal experience. During the period when he was unable to sleep more than ten minutes at a time from spinal pain, he discovered that immersing himself in a hot bath created buoyancy, which relieved approximately eighty percent of the back pain by removing the gravitational pressure on the damaged vertebrae. He would soak for extended periods, up to one to two hours at a time, adding sea salt and coconut cream to the water. In the United States, he said he would have used raw milk instead of coconut cream for this purpose. In Thailand, where raw milk was difficult to acquire, coconut cream was the practical substitute. This buoyancy effect was significant enough that he spent roughly six hours daily in the bathtub during the most acute phase of his injury, broken into one-to-two-hour sessions. Upon exiting the bath, with the muscles warm and relaxed, he would perform the spinal twists and the plow.

He consistently distinguished between hot water bottles and heating pads, opposing the use of electric heating pads because of the electromagnetic fields they emit, which he stated cause cellular damage. Hot water bottles were always the correct tool.

Aajonus did not oppose chiropractic adjustment categorically. He acknowledged that he had benefited greatly from chiropractors during his years of back problems, visiting them as frequently as three times a week at certain points. However, he identified a critical flaw in the standard approach: going to a chiropractor when the muscles and tendons are tight creates a situation where the vertebrae, even after being manipulated back into place, will be pulled out again within minutes or hours because nothing surrounding them has been adequately relaxed. The chiropractor can snap vertebrae back into position, but if the surrounding tissue remains in spasm and contraction, the adjustment will not hold.

His prescribed solution was to prepare the spine with thirty minutes in a hot bath, or thirty minutes of hot water bottles along the spine, before any chiropractic appointment. This would allow the muscles and connective tissue to relax sufficiently so that when the adjustment was made, the vertebrae had a chance of remaining in proper position.

He also noted that electromagnetic treatments used by some chiropractors, along with certain deep electrical stimulation and massage methods, were in his view damaging rather than helpful. These approaches bruise tissue and create electromagnetic field exposure that damages cellular structure.

By the time he was describing his current health in various workshops, he no longer required chiropractic care because he could achieve the same result himself by getting into the plow and performing the spinal twist yoga exercises, which he said would put his back back into place. A hot bath or hot jacuzzi allowed everything to expand sufficiently, and the subsequent stretching would complete the alignment.

Aajonus described a specific postural requirement during respiratory illness, colds, flu, and pneumonia. His instruction was categorical: never lie down if you are having a breathing problem. When the lungs are detoxifying or repairing, many of the associated muscles are not functioning fully. In the lying position, gravity pushes the lungs closed, and without adequate muscle and glandular tone to resist that force, the lungs cannot remain properly open. In the sitting or semi-reclined position, gravity works in the opposite direction and pushes the lungs open. He recommended sleeping sitting at a slant, for example in a reclining leisure chair, so that the lungs would be held open rather than pressed shut. He specified that lungs can collapse vertically but not horizontally, which is why the seated position protects respiratory function during illness.

Aajonus challenged the conventional scientific position that everyone shrinks over a lifetime due to the constant force of gravity on the spine. In his reading, the gravitational force is not the cause of height reduction. The cause is poor nutrition that fails to supply the body with what it needs to maintain spinal disc hydration, cartilage integrity, and bone density. He cited his own measurements as evidence: at growth maturity his standing height was five feet seven and six-tenths inches. One year after radiation and chemotherapy at age twenty-two, it had reduced to five feet six and nine-tenths inches. By age sixty-four, measured at a Life Screening testing site, his standing height was five feet seven and eight-tenths inches. Rather than continuing to shrink as the gravity theory would predict, he had grown seven-tenths of an inch over his later forty-two years, recovering the loss from medical treatment and adding a further two-tenths of an inch beyond his original measurement. He interpreted this as evidence that the body can restore and even improve its structural height under proper nutritional conditions, and that the shrinkage commonly observed in aging populations is a consequence of the nutritional deficiencies created by cooked and processed foods, not an inevitable effect of gravity.

Aajonus connected electromagnetic field exposure from computers and vehicles to postural and structural deterioration, specifically identifying what is conventionally called carpal tunnel syndrome and other ergonomic complaints. He rejected the conventional explanation that carpal tunnel results from the angle at which people type. His counter-argument was that people typed on old manual typewriters with much more physical force required per keystroke and experienced no such complaints. The problems began when electric typewriters and then computers introduced electromagnetic field exposure into close proximity with the hands and wrists.

A computer tower, in his account, can emit one hundred twenty-five to two hundred gauss of electromagnetic field and must be kept more than three feet from the body to avoid causing damage. When positioned at desk height, it affects the shoulders, ribs, and breasts. When positioned lower, it affects the knees and hip bones, which are primary sites of red blood cell production. He used a laptop for this reason, which emits significantly lower field levels, thirty-five to eighty gauss from the microprocessor, and used a separate keyboard to avoid having the laptop's EMF field directly over his hands.

He found through testing with a Trifield meter that different vehicles produce dramatically different EMF exposures. A Honda Insight, for example, produced approximately seventy-five gauss in the back seat where the battery was located, and fifty gauss or higher in the front seats when the vehicle was in motion. His Prius tested at four to eight gauss at standstill and approximately thirteen gauss in motion, low enough that he could occupy it for six to seven hours without significant effect. He noted that sitting in high-EMF vehicle seats produces the same pattern of symptoms he associated with EMF exposure generally: soreness, achiness, and stiffness, and that these symptoms increase in direct proportion to the duration of exposure. Children sitting in back seats over batteries were particularly vulnerable because their cells are more susceptible to disruption.

He described personally verifying this by tracking his symptoms after time in different vehicles and at his computer, and found that extended laptop use without a separate keyboard caused his hand to go numb, which he attributed directly to the EMF field rather than to any postural or angular factor.

For scoliosis specifically, Aajonus recommended a combination of dietary and thermal interventions rather than purely mechanical approaches. The primary dietary recommendations he gave for scoliosis were: eating a moisturizing lubrication formula, eating cheese and honey together four times daily, and consuming raw milk, which he described as one of the most important foods for the condition. He recommended eating the milk with a little cheese and honey.

Hot water bottles were his consistent recommendation for structural spinal conditions, always heat and never cold, on the grounds that cold never adequately hydrates or circulates nutrients to the area. Cold application, in his framework, can numb pain temporarily but is not a healing mechanism, whereas heat increases circulation of nutrients to the area, supports detoxification, and promotes repair.

For herniated discs within the context of spinal conditions generally, he indicated that the underlying problem of congestion backing up from the intestines into the spine was a significant driver of ongoing spinal nerve compression. He described how toxicity in the intestines could back up through the nerves connecting the spine to the digestive tract, affecting the spine all the way up to the clavicle and shoulder blades. The answer in such cases was to address the intestinal congestion through diet while using hot baths and hot water bottles to support the spine directly.

In response to a question about a pronounced cervical curvature diagnosed by X-ray, with accompanying nerve compression, hip problems, and foot over-pronation, Aajonus did not reject the chiropractor's assessment of the mechanical cascade from neck to lower back and feet. He acknowledged that chiropractic adjustments could be beneficial but maintained that repeated adjustments without dietary support would require ongoing visits because the underlying biochemical conditions causing the tension and misalignment had not changed. His consistent position was that the diet had to be doing its work of supplying the raw materials for tissue repair, and that heat preparation before each adjustment was essential to make the adjustment effective and less abrasive to the surrounding tissue.

He noted that his particular chiropractor used heat treatment, massage, and exercises alongside the adjustment itself, which he characterized as better in principle than simply applying the adjustment cold, even while questioning the electrical treatments some chiropractors employ.

Aajonus traced a detailed arc of his own postural and spinal recovery. At his worst, after radiation therapy, he could not sit, could not lie down without waking in excruciating pain within ten minutes, and could only move by crawling on his elbows and dragging the lower half of his body across hardwood floors. He removed furniture from his living room and slept on the hardwood floor itself because the softness of a mattress created unpredictable movements that would pinch nerves and cause him to wake screaming.

By age twenty-seven, he had improved to the point where he could tolerate bicycle travel, though he still needed to stop every hour to an hour and a half and perform yoga postures, specifically the plow and spinal twists, for fifteen to forty-five minutes before he could continue. He described this as his normal mode of travel during the three and a half years he spent living off a bicycle, journeying through North America with animals and indigenous peoples. The yoga stretches kept his back elongated enough that it would not grind and crunch, and he used them to prevent the worst of the pain from accumulating, though he was always in some degree of pain throughout that period.

As his diet improved and his body accumulated more raw nutritional resources for repair, his dependence on these external interventions gradually decreased. He described being able to crack his own back into place by getting into the plow, and he moved away from regular chiropractic visits entirely. His hamstrings, which he noted had never developed properly due to childhood vaccine damage, remained shortened and tight, limiting his ability to bend forward, and he could not bend backward far. But he described being able to touch his toes, which represented a significant improvement over childhood when the same movement was excruciating, and he described looking forward to further hamstring recovery as his nutritional program continued to support tissue repair.

At sixty-two years old, following a serious motorcycle accident that caused extensive skin and tissue damage, he described still being fully functional and capable of extended mountain hiking, which he contrasted with what he would expect from most people his age under similar circumstances.