05/02/2026
Last week I introduced myself. Not as the chiropractor. As the patient.
This week I want to put that patient’s case in clinical context — because without it, you cannot fully understand what the numbers say. Or what they mean for you.
Spondylolisthesis is graded on a scale of one to five. Grade 1 is mild. Most people with Grade 1 never know they have it. Grade 2 is moderate. Grade 3 — where I sat — means the vertebra has slipped between 50 and 75% forward on the one below it. Grade 4 is 75% or more. Grade 5 is a complete displacement.
But the number alone doesn’t tell the whole story. When a vertebra slips forward at that magnitude, the entire spine above it follows. The whole upper torso shifts forward as the body searches for a new center of gravity — adapting to a new resting position and all the biomechanical consequences that come with it. Posture changes. Gait changes. The musculature reorganizes around a new normal. It is not a local problem. It is a whole body event.
And the warning that came with my diagnosis went further than that.
Without fusion, I was told, the entire spine ran the risk of slipping off the sacrum entirely — collapsing into the abdominal cavity.
Whether that outcome was probable or merely possible, that is how it landed for a 13-year-old boy and his mother sitting in a surgeon’s office in 1974.
We left that appointment carrying the weight of a worst case scenario. That weight rode home with us in silence for 15 miles.
Grade 3 is not mild. It is not moderate. It is the point at which surgeons in 1974 did not ask questions. They scheduled procedures.
Here is what the research shows.
Spondylolisthesis of any grade affects roughly 6 to 8 percent of the general population. High grade slips — Grade 3 and above — represent perhaps 10 to 15 percent of all cases. You are already looking at less than 1 percent of the general population before you add a single other variable.
In the surgical literature from 1977 through 1991, the bias toward fusion for symptomatic adolescent Grade 3 spondylolisthesis was overwhelming.
One study of 129 consecutive patients showed that every single one received fusion surgery.
Every one.
The conservative management cohort from my era is virtually nonexistent in the literature. You cannot study a group that was never allowed to form.
I was never fused. I was never operated on. And across 52 years of serial radiographs, my Meyerding grade has never changed.
What followed instead — college football, powerlifting, competitive natural bodybuilding, twenty years of distance running, a Boston Marathon qualifier at 54 — has no published comparison group.
Because that group was never allowed to exist.
This is not a story about defying medicine. It is a story about what happens when the body is given access, load, movement, and time.
If you have been handed a diagnosis of high grade spondylolisthesis and told that surgery was your only option — I want you to know that one path existed that the literature never fully captured.
Not for low grade slips, where conservative management is now well established. But for a symptomatic adolescent Grade 3 — managed conservatively across 52 years, with full athletic function and no progression — there is no published comparison group.
Not because it wasn’t real.
Because it was never studied.
That path is what I will be presenting at The National in Orlando this August alongside one of the most respected radiologists in the profession — the first chiropractor in history inducted into the International Skeletal Society, and the man who calls this case his Capstone.
The body adapts to what you ask of it.
That’s not philosophy. That’s 52 years of documented evidence.
Next week: what it means to sit in a radiologist’s classroom for 110 hours and not know yet that the films on the screen are telling your story.
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