Marla Miller: Welcome, everyone. Today I've invited back a previous guest, Eileen Durfee, because I believe she has some important information to share for anyone who suffers from back or neck pain, which I think that's probably most of us. In case you missed the previous episode or haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, Eileen Durfee is a former nuclear power plant engineer who became sick due to chemical exposure. Her journey to overcome her own health issues led her to become an inventor and business woman. Eileen founded her own health company called Creatrix Solutions to create and distribute natural healing products. So, today, we are going to be discussing spinal health, and how it may be possible to restore the natural curve in your back and eliminate back and neck pain. Welcome, Eileen, how are you?
Eileen Durfee: I'm doing good. Thank you for having me back.
Marla Miller: Well, you had so much great information on the last episode we did. But we hadn't gotten to the spinal health. And I think that's such an important thing these days for everyone. Everyone always seems at the very least to have tension in their neck and back. It seems that everything you create has to do with your own personal experience first, and then you create a product around that. So, I'm curious as to what your experience was with back and neck pain and what motivated you to create not only the products around back and neck pain, but gather all the information necessary to help you figure out how to help yourself and help others in that area.
Eileen Durfee: Well, the doctor ripped me out with forceps. My parents didn't realize that my body was twisted until I started walking. And one knee was turned in. And so, they put me in special shoes. I had leg cramps all the time. Anatomically, my bones were the same length. It was just all that twisting in the hips. And as I grew, you know, I just had back pain. I grew nine inches in three months, the summer of the eighth grade, which was extremely painful.
Marla Miller: Wow!
Eileen Durfee: And of course, my shoulders were hunched over. I had, you know, terrible posture. At that time, they sent me to a chiropractor who just put a lift in my shoe. The chiropractic adjustments just really didn't do much for me. So, I, I just lived with that chronic pain. It was bad enough that they excused me from physical education, you know, not to participate in it. And then, when I was just turned 17, I was walking in a parking lot. And the sun had blinded this driver. And she ran into me and I flew up on her hood.
Marla Miller: Oh my god.
Eileen Durfee: And you know, instinctively I stuck my arms out which jammed and really created like a scoliosis that I didn't have before in my thoracic area to the point where I couldn't lift my arms. And every time I took a breath, it was like somebody was taking a knife, stabbing me in the heart. And I met a 93-year-old chiropractor who said that I needed to see this younger chiropractor, Dr. Scherger who had rehabilitative exercises. So, I went over there and I was getting like adjusted every day initially, which seems like a lot. But he had me lay over these special folded towels and then over time began some therapeutic exercises. And the neurologist I mean, they stuck needles, you know with electricity to check nerves and everything like that. And they just thought I wasn't going to have restored function to use my arms.
However, with those exercises and his principles, I recovered, and I actually started teaching exercise classes. I almost went to school to become a chiropractor because it had changed my life so much. And I remained friends with Dr. Scherger. Actually, his wife wasn't able to adjust his neck. So, actually he taught me and I would adjust my own chiropractor’s neck and you know, for my kids, he took x rays of my children and as they were growing up, I adjusted my own kids’ backs. So, I've been very into spinal health doing very different exercises. They're ones that he actually created.
He used to work out at the Nuclear Power plant. And he was like, using cranes and stuff like that. So, he's - he was very interested in physics. He studied a lot about Leonardo da Vinci, Borelli. He was a Pettibon trained chiropractor. So, he is really into spinal biomechanics and the lever systems in the body. And one thing that had never been done before his work was analyzing the shear and compression forces of every joint in the human spine. And so, Dr. Scherger set out to mathematically do that, because he was trying to understand why athletes with a big low back curve were injured less, could be the strongest one, like when football players tackle each other and push each other back.
Marla Miller: Yeah.
Eileen Durfee: He was wondering why the one with the low back curve always was the strongest, didn't get injured as much, wasn't as fatigued. And so that's where he went about doing all the mathematics on every joint in different extension, considering perfect posture in gravity. Dr. Burl Pettibon was the one who first created that spinal model. And that's why Pettibon trained chiropractors are different than other chiropractors. Because other chiropractors will adjust your bones to relieve tension, but not necessarily give you what you need to restore the curvature. Because one thing people don't realize is, you cannot change the muscle attachments to bone. And so, when you have proper posture and you’re at a neutral position, you will not have tight muscles, like your hamstrings will be completely relaxed. How many people can stand up and don't have tight hamstrings?
And so, it's because the bones collectively don't have the right shape. It doesn't have that S shape. And Dr. Scherger taught that when we're born, we're C shape. A baby can't sit up. But then your 80, 90-year-old, we see them like start going back to the C shape using the cane. You lose that curvature, you lose your health, you know, or if you don't obtain the curvature, you lose the health. If you don't have that S shaped curvature, the openings in the vertebrae for your nerve canals are restricted. And of course, from the brain stem, all of our electrical impulses to control our organs are going through there.
And so, you know, if you have organ problems, you know, you also need to look at the structure, the impingements to think about the energy the body expends in tightening those muscles. And I just can understand in some severe cases where people will give muscle relaxers or painkillers when there's, you know, back problems. But that's actually a protective mechanism of the body to hold your shape upright in gravity and it's like an alarm going off. You know, you can't drift any further. We need the shape. Your body wants the shape. But nobody's giving that to people.
Marla Miller: Yeah, yeah, if you just medicate it, it's kind of ignoring the whole problem.
Eileen Durfee: Even a lot of chiropractors. I just met a chiropractor. He goes, oh, man, you got this low back curve. Like it was a bad thing. And I'm like going Oh, no.
Marla Miller: You’re like, that’s awesome. Yeah.
Eileen Durfee: It's the position of the head over the hips. It's like, yeah, you have to have that low back curve. You also have to have the neck curve, where your head is balanced over your pelvis. So, that way your muscles can be at rest, and have less impingement, less grinding off the edges, less wear and tear on your discs, you know, everything like that. And so, it is not common knowledge, this S-shaped curve. And so, they're just giving adjustments and people are going back and back to the chiropractor. Their adjustments don't last very long. You know, there's a lot of functional movement practitioners now.
They'll show you know, terrible posture before an impingement where they've gotten a much better reduction in pain and function. But they're giving you more of the military straight or yes, your head is over your hips. But you don't have the curve at the neck and the low back to balance. Like you look at most Olympic athletes, they all have this S-shape curve and they're flexible. And so, there's a huge education process that needs to happen and Dr. Scherger passed in 2006. He did a study that involved the US Olympic team, which had Bob Beaton and Jennifer Stone. And then Ron O'Neil from the New England Patriots football team. And also, the guy that was called Smitty, that worked 50 years for York Barbell, and he trained Olympic athletes. And the team of those people set out to ask the questions why those curves made the superior athlete, and that was more resilient to energies. And so, they developed exercises to be able to induce that in anybody. And there's certain exercises that they identified that actually destroy the development of that curvature. Most –
Marla Miller: Fascinating.
Eileen Durfee: Most children never develop it. And it takes 18 years from birth to be able to get those curves and the ossification, the density of the bone and everything to healthy shape. And I would say, probably 95% of people do not ever get that curvature. So, they have tight muscles, children in sports are suffering injuries and not able to continue because they're not first taking care of that curvature.
Marla Miller: So, it's not just about having a stressful life. Like when you think of tense shoulders or back, it's not just about stress. It sounds like it's something that people are doing that's changing the shape of their back beyond stress, right?
Eileen Durfee: Yes, beyond stress. So, yeah, there's repetitive motions. And Dr. Scherger, Oh, he's used to say, you know, you floss and brush the teeth you want to keep. So, you got to do your neck flexion, your pelvic tilt, and your sit up to attain or keep the curvature. But every day, now, you see people all over with their heads bent forward, texting on their phones, or hunching over their desks. And gravity takes its toll and gravity's gonna win. That's why we have the tight muscles. Our bones are collectively not in the right S shape to sustain that, and we can work and hunch over and things like that. But we also have to know that, hey, if we eat candy and go to bed, and don't floss and brush, we're gonna lose our teeth. So, we got to think, okay, I've done this for so many hours.
So, now, I can spend like three minutes doing a few of these neck flexions. We have all these fitness trackers that tell us to get up and move and to drink water. That's when we should do like five or six reps of the neck flexion to make up for working at our desk. And we should be doing this back twist rotation that Dr. Scherger taught to cause our spinal discs. You know, normally they're at a sponge state. But if you did this particular twist, it actually causes the blood vessels to pump nutrition into the spinal discs and it changes their density. It goes to like a soft gel. Then he taught me how to fold some towels and lay over them for 20 minutes in a relaxed state. So, then those tight muscles because of gravity, because of our shape, they loosen up. And then our spinal discs go back to the sponge state. So, it kind of like encourages better posture.
Now, he always wanted to develop these cushions that it had a firmer density than a towel and a better groove so that the spinous bone, it's like if you put your hand on the back of your bone, and if you don't know anatomy, that little pointy bone in the middle. That's the spinous. We need to let that float. All these foam rollers out there, the chirp wheel, the plexus wheel, the yoga rolls. They're all like crunching that bone. They're like painful, you know, maybe getting some myofascial release, which is painful, you know. I'm not saying it's all bad, but it's not serving the purpose that we need to achieve to make a change and that is the shape of the spine.
So, we have to let the spinous float and with that groove, the edges, the very outside edges of the vertebrae or that, what they call the transverse process, but those actually catching are supported. So, these grooves become like a train for a train track. It guides it. And see, when we have a loss of curvature, the shear force is reversed so it's easier for bones to go out of alignment, because it stresses our ligaments, it stresses two muscles that are pretty much forgotten, the multifidus and the inner spinalis muscles. And so, what we - the exercises that he developed strengthen those muscles. But after doing that spinal twist and laying over cushions that are - have the different densities, that have that more defined groove. Literally everyone that I've sized the cushions for will lay there and they go, Eileen, I hear my bones move.
Marla Miller: So, we can go back just a little bit. So, when you were initially working with Dr. Scherger, and he's giving you exercises for you to do at home these simple things it sounds like, can you describe them just a little bit, the -
Eileen Durfee: Yeah, he originally had me roll up a sleeping bag, because this is about inducing curvatures. So, it's based on physics and joints and angles. Never do a regular sit up again. That was one of the first things he taught me. And to actually begin to arch over the sleeping bag like some people do over an exercise ball, but the exercise ball is the wrong shape. And then to arch back, and some people can't arch back very far, because they're so stiff, you know –
Marla Miller: Yeah.
Eileen Durfee: Try to arch as far as you can without pain. And then you lead with your chest, not your head. You're not doing a curl of your chin to your chest, but you lead with the chest and you sit up. And that is going to exercise your abdominals in a way, it like it puts your back into good posture, even though it's not. So, you avoid the posterior shear. The posterior shear, you know, coming from behind you is what can herniate discs, you know can cause inflammation in your spine, can allow the vertebrae because there's these parts of the vertebrae called the facet. If you had the S shaped curve, it's impossible to twist the spine to dislocate a bone. Because the facets go bone on bone. They lock like a vise. But when we don't have that S shaped curve and gravity's pushing down on us and the shear goes the opposite direction. Then our ligaments are strained and the multifidus and spinalis muscles, they can only last so long, hour after hour, day after day of hunched over posture. Then those would dislocate your bones and cause pain.
Marla Miller: So, you’re saying, if you're laying back on this rolled up sleeping bag, where are you putting it?
Eileen Durfee: Right up against your low back and you arch over it. And that's called the sit-up. And the reason he developed a cushion that also has a groove is because the sleeping bag, yeah, it’s a start. You know, people can do that at home without spending any money. But it doesn't have the groove to guide the bones.
Marla Miller: Yeah.
Eileen Durfee: To really shear, you know herniated disc back into place. You can strengthen some abdominal muscles without hurting your ligament or your multifidus or your spinalis. It's going to encourage proper curvature.
Marla Miller: So, you said initially he taught you a standing up -
Eileen Durfee: Version. Yes, where you have your feet planted shoulder width apart, hands on your waist, and then you thrust your pelvis, and squeezing the buttocks, doing that and releasing it. So, we need our pelvis in the right place of our knees and feet. So that pelvic tilt helps do that.
Marla Miller: So, when you were in all this pain, and you had these various injuries throughout your life, you started working with him and he gave you, what was it? Three main exercises -
Eileen Durfee: There’s like four things. Laying over the sleeping bag for a new sit-up, the standing pelvic tilt. He had me do the back twist and laying over rolls. So, that's like kind of like a passive exercise you can read while you're doing it in a multitask.
Marla Miller: How do you do the back twist?
Eileen Durfee: I have a video on my website about how to do that.
Marla Miller: And you do that back and forth how many times?
Eileen Durfee: 30 times. Then, you immediately lay over the rolls. And then, it relaxes for 20 minutes. So, you'll hear your bone shift on the rolls that we have, the neck and the back shaper rolls. And then after 20 minutes, you can roll over to your side, get on your hands and knees and get up. Then, your discs are back to that sponge state. And it's so effective. I mean, that reduced my pain from that accident dramatically even - So, I would do it after an adjustment, I would do it before bed because it prepares your body for sleep. For me, I'm not a sports person.
But let's say I played baseball or football. After an invigorating game or a UFC fight where you know I've kind of been beat up, that's when you would do the back twist and lay over the rolls again, because again, it's going to loosen up the muscles and your bones are going to shift to a better desirable location because of these patented grooves. And then that's going to reduce pain and speed healing and recovery from physical exertion. Or like if I, you know, get a container loads of goods and everybody's unloading it, it's a rough day. That's like, that's when I go to my back twists and I lay down, it's just so helpful.
Marla Miller: So, when you're talking about these body rolls, you kind of expanded on his idea and created something even better, as far as what you would lay back on?
Eileen Durfee: Yeah. And I was issued three design patents and two utility patents on this exercise equipment, I call it for spinal fitness, because that's, that's what he coined it as, his exercises for spinal fitness. We have five different diameters for both the neck and the back. They each have a different groove to match the size of vertebrae in that area of your body. And then they come in three different densities. Because if you're injured, you've got to start with a soft, smaller diameter cushion. If you're not in pain, the medium one might work. The idea is to size rolls, and we have a sizing kit and a video on how to size the rolls. But the idea is to get one set of rolls, one for your neck and your low back where when you lay down, it's completely comfortable. No pain, but completely comfortable.
So, then your muscles release and the bones move. Then, because most people do not have curvature, they are flat, flat backs, you know, forward in posture. So, we want to encourage an increase in that curvature. So, that's why you go up a diameter and maybe even a density. So, out of that 20 minutes, maybe you can only stand five minutes on the larger diameter, and then spend the rest of the time on the other. And with the firmer cushions, that's when you hear your bones move even more. And so, the athletic people or like people who are you know, 200 pounds, and plus, or as long as you're not injured, they're going to like the medium and the hard better than the soft.
So, there's 30 products you need to be sized but you, you buy two sets of rolls, the comfortable one and the next one up so that you can work on improving that curvature. And I have to tell a story. It’s a little boy, he was about 12 years old, had a trampoline accident, and he had been through chiropractor’s physical therapy, and continued to have seizures. And his father came in and this is when I was prototyping the product. So, I sized him and gave him cushions. And a month later, the father came back to me and says, he takes those everywhere with him. Every single day, he does the back twist and lays over it and he's never had a seizure since.
Marla Miller: Wow, that must be very gratifying for you knowing the product works so well?
Eileen Durfee: Oh, oh, so much. I mean, it helped me so much out of pain and oh, and it helps me because I mean, I am thrashing my body doing all kinds of stuff, you know. And life just keeps on lifing and gravity is there. And we have to win against it. So, these tools are invaluable to me and to others and I just have people. When I was first doing the prototype cushions, people were sharing them and they're like, oh, no, yeah, my friend. She has constant migraines. And she did the back twist and she laid over that and she's not having migraines, you know, because that's the first thing I think about, it's either copper toxicity or the spine causing the migraines and it's just the shape. And ordinary chiropractic adjustments are helpful, but you have to gain the curvature to be pain free.
Marla Miller: Well, it makes you think about all the people suffering needlessly out there with something as common as migraines.
Eileen Durfee: Yes.
Marla Miller: When they don't have to.
Eileen Durfee: A lot of times, you know, people with migraines, the way that they're working with their desktop, with their arms forward, typing and their head down. It's tightening up their shoulders, under their shoulder blades, and then going up into the neck and then the position of the head. It's causing the headaches.
Marla Miller: Yeah.
Eileen Durfee: You know, and taking something to relieve the pain and inflammation without fixing maybe where you're putting the monitor, evaluate your chair and be able to have your arms extended in a way that it's not putting tension, you know, on the muscles. And so, we have to really rework our daily environment, start noticing. I have to laugh about that spinal product, where it's like this necklace thing that if you - posture goes too far forward, it like vibrates to remind you to –
Marla Miller: Oh, really, I haven't, I haven’t seen that.
Eileen Durfee: To have better posture. Well, you know, the last exercise that he taught me was the neck flexion. And it's a simple exercise where you just stand straight, and then you look up to the ceiling. And you're like, if you're nodding, agreeing with someone. That motion, that's at vertebrae C5 in your neck. So, that's the motion we're looking for. You're looking up, then you look down chin level. You're not pushing forward, you're not going to the side. And then you can use your hands when you're looking up and put pressure with your fingertips on your cheekbones. Just give a little resistance as you bring your chin level. And then when you level, what you do is, you completely relax the muscles in your neck and you push back with the pressure on the cheekbones. And what that does is, it'll actually increase your low back curve as you do that. And then bring the head over the pelvis where it's supposed to be.
So, it's like a memory that we're building in the body when we do that neck flexion besides tightening the right muscles in our neck and inducing curvature because of the resistance and the force we're applying. But it's like when you see people trying to throw their shoulders back because I've got to stand up straight. No, leave the shoulders hunched forward, and then do the neck flexion where you push it back, your shoulders automatically go into position.
Marla Miller: So, I mean, I can see what you're doing. So, I understand it completely. And I think you've described it pretty well. But you said there is a video if people want to see like the next flexion -
Eileen Durfee: Yes. Yes.
Marla Miller: As well as the other -
Eileen Durfee: They have PDF guides that I did medical illustrations of exactly the positions with written text on how to do it besides a video. And it also goes into the analysis that Dr. Scherger did. I have all that in PDF guides that are free for people to go to the website and download and they get a link to the PDF document.
Marla Miller: Okay. So, I guess we let people know, first of all, where they can find you and find these videos and the PDF and your products, how could they find that information.
Eileen Durfee: Sure. The company name is Creatrix Solutions, and so is the website. It's creatrixsolutions.com. And there's a whole exercise section with a drop-down menu. Because we've got the free PDF guides. We've got the neck shaper so that you can, it's a cushion piece with a bar that makes it very easy to perform the neck flexion at home. And then it's got the neck rolls, the low back rolls. And then we have one more product I forgot to talk about. We have a flexible foam cushion called the Back Trac which has the groove. And so most people are going to know how to use that because they just put it down there but the, the spinous goes in the grooves and then you just you know roll back and forth which I have Instagram videos on how to do that and you know, written instructions as well and other videos, but that I have been getting such a positive response to that.
One of the customers has used just about every kind of foam roller on the market and would get migraines from using it because of her injuries. And so, she had ordered the orange Back Trac, which is the medium density and she was singing the praises of how there was no pain. Yet it was relieving her structural problems and loosening muscles and giving her much relief. We need solutions because back pain, just low back pain alone is $100 billion a year problem. We need products that don't hurt people, that are therapeutic, that actually encourage a better alignment of the vertebrae. It does no good to just pop and crunch, if it's not forcing that vertebrae to go into a better space.
Marla Miller: Yeah.
Eileen Durfee: And so yeah, that's, the Back Trac is amazing but all those things are on the website.
Marla Miller: When you talked about the cushions, I understand the density, like you would pick the softer one if you're injured. And you need to take it a little bit easier versus a medium or the harder one. But what about the sizing? How do people pick the right size?
Eileen Durfee: Yes. We sell a sizing kit that has five cushions in it. They are little small cushions and they come in three different densities. Not every diameter has the same density, but at least you're going to get an idea of the hardness, and what's going to be comfortable to you. And I have written instructions and several videos on how to lay down, where to place those to determine your size.
Marla Miller: Okay.
Eileen Durfee: And that's the thing is, you're going to end up meeting a lot of different sizes. Like when I'm sitting on a couch, I use a very different low back roll to support good posture while I'm working. Versus the kind that I would lay down after I do the back twist. In my vehicle, I use a different size roll too. So, I mean, there's a way to size them for the back twist and laying down to move the bones. But then there's a lot of other uses for those rolls.
Marla Miller: So, you have rolls that are just solid, and then you have a Back Trac with the indentation in it?
Eileen Durfee: All the rolls have an indentation. We got to guide the transverse process and let the spinous float so they all have grooves in them. It's just that the diameter of the one that you would lay on your back with your knees bent going back and forth on rolling like you would in normal foam roller like people think of foam rollers. That one's a six-inch diameter. So, that is different than the ones that go on to your neck. So, they're just for different purposes.
Marla Miller: Okay. So, before we sign off here, do you have another success story of someone that used the product to great avail?
Eileen Durfee: Yes. Okay. So, there's a company that I work with, a PR company. So, I gave samples out to Major League Baseball players and NFL players, and his father-in-law was scheduled for neck surgery. So, I said, Yeah, give him one. Teach him how to use it. You know, I can do a Facebook Live or Instagram or something to make sure he's doing it right. So, this guy for over 10 years had had neck pain so bad, they're getting ready to fuse his neck. And after two weeks of using the neck shaper, he cancelled surgery and is pain-free.
Marla Miller: That's unbelievable. That's fantastic. I do have a question. I'm always asking for my family members when they have issues. So, my dad has a neck issue. I think it's an impinged nerve, but they can't, you know, normally they do surgery or they would I guess burn the nerves? Like somehow get in there and burn parts of the nerve.
Eileen Durfee: Yeah.
Marla Miller: So, he wouldn't, he wouldn't feel the pain. But it's too close to the brainstem. So, is this something that could help him without, you know, further injury or pain?
Eileen Durfee: Yes. I would say, start up with the soft cushions, get the sizing kit, figure out what size he needs. And you know, when you do the back twist, I'm pretty flexible, where I can really twist. Even if somebody's just going like 10 degrees, just barely moving. That's a start, you know, because when you loosen the tight muscles and allow the bones to shift, then nerves because there's a sheath coming off your spinal cord. It's called the dura that encapsulates the brain and all the spinal fluid. And then off the spinal cord, that dura comes out and it forms what we call a meninge and that's where the nerves come through.
So, that meninge helps protect the nerves from being impinged by the vertebrae when they're in the wrong spot. So, when you're laying on these rolls, and your muscles are relaxing, and the nerve canals in the bones shift to impinge the meninge less, then the nerves are sending impulses like they should or they're not being pinched to signal pain. I mean, pain is like emergency, emergency. Get the right shape. That's really all it's telling us. And people are not teaching people how to get the right shape. It’s surgery, it’s all these things, you know, and so -
Marla Miller: Who are living with the pain?
Eileen Durfee: Yes.
Marla Miller: Surgery are living with the pain.
Eileen Durfee: Or the hydrocodone in the epidemic, how many people are taking that because they have back pain that can't be operated on or can't be helped.
Marla Miller: Yeah.
Eileen Durfee: Yeah, my passion because I suffered for so many years with back pain is to be able to help these people. And I mean, I've had 80-year-olds that can barely walk that I would get them over to the massage table, because it was a good height for them to crawl on without getting down. And then I had my power cushion there, which I will be bringing the power cushion with a built-in neck shaper to the product line. Right now, we only have the 33 spinal fitness pieces of equipment. There will be more. And so, I could have them get up on there. And just hang their pelvis with that groove to cradle their hips with the groove that lets the low back vertebrae, you know, float. And it just put a little bit of pressure on their iliac and have them do just pelvic tilt motions that maybe only one or two inches. They get off of there. And they're like, oh my gosh, it's such relief.
Marla Miller: Well, that is a very noble pursuit you have of helping people heal their backs and necks all around the world here. So, do you sell it worldwide? Or is it just in US?
Eileen Durfee: I haven't yet. I just got them in inventory at the end of March. So, this is like brand new. I mean, I've had prototypes for years, and I've been teaching people you know how to do this for years. But yeah, it's, it's brand new.
Marla Miller: Well, that's exciting that we get to be some of the first to check it out. So, people just go to creatrixsolutions.com. And they'll find all the information they need in the videos, right?
Eileen Durfee: Yes, that's correct.
Marla Miller: Right. Well, I'm so glad that you came back on here and gave even more beneficial information for listeners. I think it's really amazing what you're doing. And I can't wait to test those products out myself.
Eileen Durfee: And I wanted to mention of any of the listeners that maybe have fuses with their spine, you still have motion below and above that fuse. And so, you can still do the spinal twist, you can still fit and lay over the rolls. You can still do the Back Trac, I recommend starting with the softer density. And then, instead of like buying the neck shaper and using the neck shaper, I would like them to start like the PDF guides just by looking up to the ceiling and chin down, doing that motion, so that above and below the fuse, you can get and maintain more flexibility. And then as time goes on, you can apply pressure. And if in your particular fuse situation that that doesn't cause pain, then you could go ahead and use the neck shaper. But all of these exercises or things are never to pain.
Like even though we say, do the back twist and lay down for 20 minutes. Even on the smallest diameter rolls, I have some people that have to bend their knees. They can't have their legs straight and they can only start with five minutes. That's where you start. Thankfully, those people now can lay there with their bent knees with no pain and feel relaxation for 20 minutes. So, it's just baby steps and you never go to the point of pain.
Marla Miller: That's great. That's perfect for people to know. Thank you so much again for being here.
Eileen Durfee: Oh well, thank you for having me.
