Steve Davison

I came to this the long way round

I started out in engineering, as a draughtsman, before working out that what actually interested me was biology. I read immunology at King’s College London, and it was there I came across psychoneuroimmunology. At the time it was a small and largely ignored corner of the field. A decade after I left, there were textbooks on it. The idea that the immune system and the nervous system were in constant conversation stayed with me. I went on to Queens’ College, Cambridge, to work in molecular genetics.

Then, in my twenties, I hurt my back.

I was sure I had done something mechanical in the gym, and just as sure it would heal. It didn’t. It went on for two years. I saw everyone: surgeons, osteopaths, acupuncturists, anyone who said they could fix backs. I ended up in front of a chiropractor who didn’t fix me overnight, but who clearly knew exactly what he was looking at, and I began to improve almost at once. That changed the direction of my career. I found a postgraduate conversion course at Surrey and qualified in 2001.

But it left me with a question I couldn’t drop. Was it only the mechanical work he had done, or was there something more to it? And for years afterwards I was certain of one thing: my own pain had been mechanical. A structural problem with a structural solution. I had lived it. I knew.

I was wrong.

It was only later, watching patients plateau and then unexpectedly turn a corner, and getting deeper into the philosophies, the techniques and Traditional Chinese Medicine, that I looked back properly. I had been going through an enormous amount of turbulence in my life at the time I first hurt my back. The pain had never been purely mechanical. I simply had no framework that let me see it.

The one that changed everything was John Sarno, and his work on the personality patterns that predispose people to pain. I read it and recognised half my caseload. From there I went into the research on neuroplasticity and psychoneurophysiology, the work of Scott Walker and Roger Callahan, and into trauma and the small, accumulated micro-traumas that shape a nervous system over a lifetime.

The last piece arrived through my wife. We were introduced to a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and I watched her work. She approached my wife completely differently from anyone else we had seen: the way she looked at the body, what she believed it needed, how she spoke about encouraging it rather than correcting it. Once I had seen it, I couldn’t unsee it.

Once I had all the pieces, building the protocol itself took just over a year.

The Elaris Method is what happened when those things finally sat down together: the science I had trained in, the pain I had misread in myself, and a way of seeing the body I had never been taught.