Treating the network that holds you together

In October of 2007, there was a conference at Harvard. The main topic was not heart disease or cancer. It was fascia.

Fascia is a network of soft tissue fibers that are intertwined within our muscles, tendons, ligaments and organs. It basically holds everything in proper place. It supports our bones. It gives our body structural stability.

It’s important in the understanding of pain.

It has been discovered that most spinal surgeries fail. The reason is because in order to perform the surgery, the spinal fascia must be cut. When this happens, the bones may be fused, but the architecture that is necessary to hold everything snug and in place has failed. It’s kind of like fixing the cavity of a tooth, but destroying the gums in the process, so the tooth falls out anyway. This explains why spinal surgery has such a terrible success rate. Maybe it’s better to try a conservative approach like chiropractic first.

Stability is more important that flexibility in some cases. Our body requires enough flexibility to have all the joints go through NORMAL ranges of motions. If the fascia is not strong enough to keep our spine stable, our muscles will work excessively. This leads to trigger points in the muscles and pain. This can lead to abnormal ranges of motion and stiffness that stretching can address, but stability is of primary importance.

I thought this was interesting because I have noticed over the years from patients that some patients responded better to strengthening exercises more so than stretching. For example, many people with herniated discs find that strengthening exercises reduce their pain more than stretching their back. Current research now supports that observation.

Trigger points in muscles are inflammatory in nature. They have injected needles into trigger points within muscles and analyzed the chemical components and found conclusively that they are full of chemicals related to inflammation.

This explains why an anti-inflammatory diet is so beneficial.

How does that change our approach in helping you?

After reading all the notes that I got from the chiropractic journals, I came to the following changes in my treatment approach:

1. Kinesiotaping patients with lower back pain can aid tremendously in their pain because it assists in supporting the lumbar fascial component. They found that the fascia criss-crosses from the left latissimus dorsi to the right buttock/hamstring. If you are using kinesiotaping yourself, I’ll show you how to do this.

2. Stability exercises prior to stretching. I used to stretch patients a lot. Now I will be more pro-active in having patients stabilize the back first. I’m sure this will result in less pain and greater recovery.

3. Graston Technique helps heal fascial restrictions. This is an awesome soft tissue method. The patient has to be super motivated to want to get better, can not be on any blood thinning drugs, and can’t be too old. For many people, the Graston Technique can achieve excellent results due to its application to the fascia.

4. Cold Laser Therapy- helps speed the healing of soft tissue injuries. It does this by stimulating mitochondria within the cells to increase metabolically by 150%.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask me.