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Nine years of back pain, and the diagnosis no one else found
Misdiagnosed for years, Rakesh Kumari’s severe back pain left her completely handicapped. Discover how the physiotherapy team at St. Stephen’s uncovered the true underlying cause and gave her back the joy of movement, without surgery.
For eight or nine years, Rakesh Kumari lived inside a pain that never let go. It crept into every part of her day, until even the simplest comforts – sitting in a chair, lying down to rest became something to dread. “It was getting worse and worse,” she recalls. “I was not able to sit or lay down.”
When she came to St. Stephen’s, the scans told a familiar story: spondylolisthesis, a condition where one vertebra slips forward over the one beneath it, twisting and straining the spinal cord. It was the kind of diagnosis that, on paper, explained everything. But her care team looked closer and found that the slipped vertebra was not actually the source of her suffering.
The real cause was something quieter, and easier to miss: a severe sacroiliac joint dysfunction, a breakdown in the joints linking her spine to her pelvis. It was this, not the spondylolisthesis everyone assumed was to blame, that had left her unable to move freely and robbed her of her independence for years.
It wasn't the first time St. Stephen's had helped her find relief. She had come to the hospital once before for a troublesome neck condition, and that therapy had worked and her cervical pain had resolved completely. So when this new, deeper pain refused to ease, she knew exactly where to return. "Then we came here for therapy," she says. "Earlier my cervical was here too, and with that therapy my cervical also got cured. Now I am doing this therapy for my spondylolisthesis."
With the true cause finally identified, her treatment took a different shape not focusing on the spine alone, but rebuilding the body around it. Her care team focused on core strengthening, trunk stability, and restoring mobility through the spinal joints, addressing the sacroiliac dysfunction that had been driving her pain all along.
The results came steadily, and then dramatically. Some 80 to 90 percent of her pain has lifted. Where she once could not sit or lie down without suffering, Rakesh Kumari now moves through her daily life with ease walking freely, going about her routine, and reclaiming a quality of life that nine years of pain had slowly taken from her.
