Andrea Lucchetti 
Andrea Lucchetti of Wymondham Chiropractic Clinic reflects on the luxury of truffles, and of how different therapists can use different techniques to find the source of your pain.
I am sitting on a plane, waiting to fly to Italy and in doing so, giving my patients a well-deserved rest from my chiropractic and acupuncture practice!
Like an overexcited child, I am wondering about the wonderful food awaiting me this time of year. Italian cooking is very seasonal, and right now is the main truffle season!
Italians get very excited about these heavenly edible fungal spores. Their sublime, unique flavours add an extra dimension to pasta sauces, risottos, and meat sauces. For a fair few euros, a waiter will proudly grate shavings of this mysterious – to us uncultured heathens – food substance over your chosen plate, using a specially designed truffle grater. Truffles are so delicate that cooking them with the dish is sacrilegious, and instead they are eaten raw by being added at the end of the recipe or ceremoniously delivered as described. Black and white truffles compete with your wallet for gastronomic flavour, with white truffles being more delicate and costing as much as £5,000 a kilo.
Finding these subterranean treasures can be elusive, but extremely rewarding. Since Roman times, trufflers have spent their lives training pigs and dogs to smell the scents that truffles produce. Pigs may actually have the better nose, but they also have a particular penchant for eating them too, which is why many older trufflers have missing fingers from trying to prise their cherished loot out of their mouths! Since the mid-1980s, dogs have been made the legal deliverer of happiness to us mere mortals.
So, does that mean that we humans could be walking through a field in Italy, unaware of the unbelievable wealth under our feet? And did you also know you can find truffles in some parts of the UK?
In other words, if you don’t search for something, you probably won’t find it. This is the same in musculoskeletal care. Different therapists look for different things and thus find different problems in the same patients. This means that two therapists who trained together may look for different causes of your pain as they bring in their own experience and character to the examination. Just because you’ve tried a physiotherapist or a chiropractor and they didn’t help enough with your problem, does not mean that another therapist would not find something significant with his or her skill set. At the very least, it is always worth another opinion.
At our clinic, we try to overlap many different exam protocols in order to try to find underlying issues. We are aware of searching in small parameters. We use x-ray imaging, muscle testing, movement patterning, neurological assessment, second opinions in house, and stress testing your joints to help us be thorough. Hopefully, by doing this, we will find the ‘truffle’ causing your problem.
- For more information, visit www.wymondhamchiropractic.com.
