It’s talking about shoving you around with a chiropractic “treatment.”

Tietze’s syndrome, or costochondritis is a cartilage inflammation of your shoulder. Chiropractic won’t help, as it doesn’t help just about anything. Real treatments are found on the linked website.

I am not a fan of chiropractic anything and agree with much of the info on the link @crisw provided for you. One thing I would suggest for someone with this issue is to learn to belly breathe instead of the chest breathing that more than likely is irritating the rib cage. Breathing into the belly will provide relief to the irritated rib bones.

First of all, you can read about chiropractic activator methods here This appears to be a spring-driven method for delivering a quick, localized “thrust which may or may not “benefit” anything.

Tietze’s syndrome, as described in your article, is about the connective cartilage between the breast end of the ribs (anterior) and the breastbone (sternum). Subluxation essentially means it is partially dislocated and, if you follow the article’s instructions and run your fingers along the sides of your breastbone, you may encounter some discomfort if the cartilage is out of place. (This usually seems to happen with the lower “floating” ribs because of how they connect to each other—rather the sternum).

Cephalad means toward the head (think cephalus) and caudad means toward the tail (think caudal fin in fish) or feet. So the chiropractor is going to feel the joint on inhaling and exhaling to see when the affected joint is stable. Then the chiropractor is going to use his or her hands to push upward or downward to “put things back into place” at the appropriate inhale or exhale as seems appropriate to the injury.

Your article does seem honest in that the chiropractor acknowledged when he or she may have actually caused this condition by a heavy adjustment in the middle of the back (presumably with the patient face down on a table).

Just to be clear though, this is an injury of the mid-chest, not the shoulder cartilage.

@Cruiser Ahh, yes. Belly Breathing. I used to be able to belly breathe effortlessly when I was younger, but now I can only master it for a few minutes at a time. At night, if I am in severe pain from the costo, I can belly breathe until I fall asleep, but it takes a lot of effort and concentration. If I could belly breathe all day, it would give me tremendous relief.