Three Ways to Read My Case

This is part of My Health, where the whole story is. Here I take my findings from My Airway, Tongue and Jaw, My Spine and Brain and How My Body Moves to three lineages of posture teaching. The PRI terms are explained on How My Body Moves.

With Claude, an AI assistant, I took my findings to 51 videos from three lineages of posture teaching on YouTube:

• the Delsarte, Alexander, Masoero and You channel, whose anonymous author teaches Jeando Masoero’s Initial Alexander Technique;
• Bill Hartman, a physical therapist with his own model;
• Neal Hallinan, who works in Postural Restoration (PRI), and with the PRI therapist Frank Mallon on links to the teeth and airway.

A caveat up front: these are practitioners’ teaching videos and anecdotes, read through auto-generated captions, and none of them is talking about me. Everything below that applies them to my case is my interpretation, not their words.

Where they agree

The neck rotation is functional. All three would read 18° sitting up against 5° lying flat as something my body does under load, not something built into the bones.

• Hartman’s version is the most specific. When the upper back between the shoulder blades is compressed, the lower neck loses its turns and the upper neck does the rotating (Upper Dorsal-Rostral, 3:28). My rotation is concentrated at C1–C2 and tapers lower down, which is roughly that shape.
• Mallon adds a test: if the head-to-neck relationship changes a lot between positions, look for drivers like vision or shoes (dental guide, 1:12:32).

The neck is downstream, so don’t fix it directly.

• Hallinan won’t use neck correctives until he knows why the curve was lost (Neck Curve, 0:00).
• Hartman expands the rib cage first, and judges success by whether the neck’s turns come back (Flat Upper Back, 8:01).
• The Alexander channel rejects chin tucks, which it says just push the ribs forward (You Don’t Have Forward Head Posture, 3:05).

My poor sense of where my torso is counts as information, not failure.

• When someone can’t feel their body, Hallinan checks vision, the mouth and ground contact before muscles (Vision, 15:44).
• The Alexander channel’s premise is that habits are something “you won’t feel, but you can see” (Seeing the Problem, 0:00), so it works from video.
• Hartman expects to guide compressed people by hand at first (End Game, 4:01).

Reclining with my neck extended loads the swallowing area.

• Tipping the head back shortens the muscles above the hyoid (Open Up Your Airway, 1:09).
• Swallowing lifts the hyoid while neck extension pulls it down, so that position asks for opposite things at once (Thorax/Neck/Breathing, 5:40).
• Only Hallinan has a reason it would be my right side. A Right TMCC loads the right sternocleidomastoid and the right omohyoid, which runs from the shoulder blade to the hyoid (Right TMCC, 1:02).

None of them explains the pain itself.

Where they split

• Compressed in which direction? This is the big one.

  • Hartman’s most common case is a front-to-back squeeze, which flattens the angle under the breastbone and sends the breath sideways (Wide or Narrow, 13:55).
  • Hallinan’s standard Right TMCC chain predicts the opposite, a flared rib cage (Right TMCC, 4:10).
  • The Alexander channel’s cues narrow the lower ribs (Unbunch Your Ribs, 3:35), which would add to compression if I’m already compressed.

  My reading: my scans can’t answer this, since the 8 mm front-to-back airway is the shape of my throat at the tongue base and my straight neck was measured lying in a head coil. My chessboard is better evidence: it matches Hartman’s end-game compression, his front-to-back case. A standing measurement of the angle under my breastbone would confirm it.

• Breathing effort. PRI is built around full exhalation. Hartman tells compressed people not to breathe aggressively, because effort squeezes them back into position (End Game, 6:02).

• The tongue. The Alexander channel wants the tongue resting low and flat (Tongue, 2:45), the opposite of typical myofunctional training. I’m following my therapist. Hallinan says a severe posterior tongue tie “might prevent their body from getting neutral at all” (Airway Centered Dentistry, 7:39).

• Sidedness. My findings are one-sided: the left nasal valve, the right-sided swallowing pain, the neck turned left under my head. Only PRI models left and right; Hartman’s body types and the Alexander model are symmetric. My standing photos agree with PRI on two counts: a lower right shoulder (Hallinan’s Right TMCC) and a left knee drifting in (Left AIC). But being a right-handed thrower explains the shoulder just as well, so it doesn’t single out either story.

• Comfort. The Alexander channel says comfort doesn’t matter; Hartman warns against trying too hard (Right Oblique, 14:38). Given my ongoing discomfort, I’m siding with Hartman.

• Change or manage. Hartman says “you’re not going to change your tendencies”, only learn to manage them (Model Part 1, 33:02). PRI aims to restore neutral. That changes what success looks like.

Which story fits the direction of my head turn

In Hallinan’s normal right-stance pattern, the right hip goes back, the right side compresses, the right shoulder drops, and the neck orients right while the head counter-turns left on top of it (Right TMCC, 1:02; dental guide, 0:00; Cranial Issues, 25:36). In that pattern my head would sit turned left on C2. My scan shows the opposite at that joint: C2 is turned left under my skull, so my head is turned right on C2. That’s what he and Mallon call a right torsion (Cranial Issues, 6:45; Oral Splints, 0:30):

• The right base of the skull compresses down onto C1, and the head turns back to the right, locking the neck into a Right TMCC.
• Their signs: the lower dental midline sits right of the upper one, the right canine touches first on gentle closing, and the response to PRI is inconsistent.
• The causes they list include the bite, a narrow palate, a tongue tie, vision and trauma.

My interpretation: of everything in the videos, this is the closest match to the direction at the top of my neck and to my oral findings. It also has the clearest test: whether right canine contact changes my neck rotation once I’m neutral. There’s some support in my own scans: my left molars meet less fully than my right (figure F), so the right side carries more of the bite, which is a cousin of their canine sign. Several causes they list (a narrow-looking upper jaw, a tongue tie, vision) are in my history. But a story whose causes cover so much is hard to rule out, and the canine test is the part that can fail. It also rests on matching a scan angle to spoken descriptions, and Hallinan says only hands-on PRI testing can confirm a torsion.

Reading the plateau

It’s been a year and a half since the injury, and my nervous system still feels unstable. My physical therapy itself was short, about four months, and it ended in late September when the rest of life got too heavy.

• Hallinan’s order for a stall:
  • First, unaddressed input from the head: vision, teeth and jaw, hearing. Basic PRI in someone driven from the head can push fight-or-flight higher through the neck and give “stop and go” progress (Left AIC Misunderstandings, 7:52).
  • Only then the pain–anxiety loop. His client Matt “hit a ceiling” after good early progress (Cranial Issues, 11:36).
• Hartman’s version: take gravity out first, with sidelying work, hands-on guidance and no straining.

Neither lens accounts for the plain physical load of these months. I’ve lost about 20 lb and slept badly, and both lower how much load tissue tolerates before it complains. Those are measured, not inferred.

One connection of my own: as I described earlier, my right eye’s field of view is narrowed and I’ve relied on my left eye for as long as I can remember. Vision is the first thing Hallinan checks in someone who can’t feel their body or has stalled (Vision, 17:58). Only my right eye can see the far right, because my nose blocks the left, and that’s where its field is narrowed. Seeing things on my right takes a bigger head turn to the right, the same direction my head sits turned on C2, and driving asks for that turn constantly. That’s my interpretation, and a test is cheap: video myself reading something far away with each eye covered in turn.

Questions I’m taking to my care team

• PT:
  • Compressed in which direction, and where?
  • What’s the angle under my breastbone when I’m standing?
  • Have I been checked for a right torsion? For example, does right canine contact change my neck?
  • Have vision and footwear been ruled out as drivers?
• Dentist: where is my lower dental midline relative to the upper, and which tooth touches first when I close lightly?
• Myofunctional therapist:
  • Can my PT re-test me before and after a session?
  • Can we avoid drills that add neck extension?
• Eyes: do glasses on or off change how my neck feels or moves?

More from My Health

• My Health My health since April 2025, body and mind: what happened, what I've felt, what I've done to get help, and what I think it means. The scans, tests and my reading of them are on four companion pages.
• My Airway, Tongue and Jaw What my April 2026 CBCT shows about my airway, nose, jaw and teeth, with the tongue tie, my sleep tests and my swallowing.
• My Spine and Brain My September 2026 MRIs of my brain, neck and mid-back, my neck sitting up on the CBCT, and why I read its rotation as functional.
• How My Body Moves What my physical therapy found, my range-of-motion chessboard, what my standing photos measure, and my eyes.
• My Deep Front Line What fascia is, what the deep front line is and how well tested it is, and why, read through it, my right side feels slack and my left tight: the right half has nothing held at either end. Then what I do about it, in order.