I was recently diagnosed with a medical condition. I've got a mild case of it, but it brings a few troublesome complications regardless, nothing serious. And as one might well do, the first thing I did when I got home upon receiving my diagnosis was Google it to learn more. The list of symptoms included what took me to treatment in the first place, a good number of troubles I don't have, and a surprising entry: poor body image. The diagnosis? Scoliosis.

Now, if I'm being officially diagnosed for the first time at age 35, obviously my scoliosis isn't terribly problematic. I was monitored for it as a child (do they still do those annual scoliois screenings at school? It somehow seems like a remnant of the '70s, like the Dorothy Hamill haircut) but it was so mild that it barely qualified as scoliosis, and it didn't warrant treatment -- certainly not intervention like surgery or a brace. Basically, my muscles compensate for my wonky spine, running me through varying degrees of pain; I treat it with exercise, occasional ibuprofen, massage, and masturbation. (Deenie in da house!) In other words, it's not a huge deal, and it's not something that weighs on my mind a lot.

But there it is, that symptom far down on the list -- below the physical pain, below the visual cues -- poor body image. There's a whole body of work devoted to studying the psychosocial effects of scoliosis, particularly in adolescents, but it boils down to this: Something about your body is "wrong," and chances are it's not something you ever thought was a problem, and you really can't do much of anything about it. Wearing a brace may or may not have an impact on patients' body image, but there's evidence supporting a correlation between scoliosis and body image, regardless of treatment.

Now, the people being studied aren't people like me: I'm an adult, for starters, and one with a very mild case of scoliosis. Though I've been told repeatedly by chiropractors, tailors, and osteopaths that there's something irregular about my form, nobody until recently has used the word scoliosis about my body since the sixth grade. Whatever body image problems I have come from the usual suspects -- perfectionism, media, growing up girl -- not my spinal curvature.

But it's not hard for me to see how my body image has shifted ever so slightly in the past few weeks. Part of it was the pain that drove me to seek treatment; it's difficult to feel like your body is something to be proud of when you're wincing whenever you take off your shirt. But more than that, I've learned that -- and this is an unkind term -- I'm misshapen. I found myself complaining of feeling "broken" and "twisted" -- words I've never used to describe myself. Whenever I've had a problem with my body, there's been a part of me that has known it's in my head, because the concerns I had were solely about about how I appeared. If I thought my thighs were unappealing, there was still a part of me that understood that "unappealing" was subject to interpretation. With a twisted spine that was causing me pain -- that wasn't in my head, that was in my bones.