BSR started in essence with the story of Ewald Meggersee who fell from a tree at the age of 5. He was unconscious for a week and when he woke up he felt a deep, burning pain in his lower back and shooting pains in his legs. He also experienced many more symptoms, for example frequency of urinating, numbness of his hands and a funny feeling in his stomach which eased if he kept eating during the day.
During his school years, he was often reprimanded for fidgeting as he was moving his legs trying to ease the pain. He struggled to participate in gym or other sports and was labelled as an attention-seeker when he could not do what the other boys did.
Ewald met Gail at university, they got married and still he had many issues related to the fall as a child. One morning he woke up with no feeling from the waist down. He rolled out of bed, pulled himself upright clinging to the wardrobe door and hung until the feeling returned to his legs. This happened several times and he admitted being afraid of going to bed as he might wake up one day permanently paralysed. He tried chiropractic, which brought some relief, for a few hours. Then Ewald and Gail decided to study chiropractic in the USA. His lower-back problem persisted through the years until he attended a weekend workshop by a retired chiropractor, Dr van Rumpt. He developed a procedure for accurately ‘reading’ the body’s muscular responses, they got his permission to use this technique and they returned to South Africa and started using it in their practice. About one year later, Ewald woke up one morning with no pain at all for the first time since he had the fall at the age of 5. After this day he experienced pain again on and off until he became pain free after 30 years.