Pain is not the problem.
Pain is a symptom of the problem.
We treat the problem that causes pain until you are satisfied or you don’t have a problem anymore - whichever you prefer.
Whether you have knee pain, back pain, urinary urgency, or headache, everyone’s problem is similar - and completely unique to them.
There are 5 major sort of “ingredients” to everyone’s problem, and thus, 5 major ingredients to the treatment for that problem that everyone needs in a way in a combination that is unique to them and the problem that they have.
Joint mobility
Fascial line mobility
Specific fascial pulls
Movement pattern retraining
Energy work/nervous system regulation
When we apply these ingredients in the right way to you, we can resolve your problem so that everything in your body moves as well as it possibly can.
Ultimately, the problem that causes musculoskeletal pain is that over time, our body loses the ability to move well. Muscles get tight and joints get stiff.
Inflammation seems to result in some stiffness - you may observe that when you have a cut the scar and the skin around the scar don’t move very well at first, and then loosen up over time as you move that area. This process is not unique to scars, but seems to occur as a result of inflammation in general. Have you ever noticed how your neck feels stiff when you get sick?
We think of inflammation as being bad and healing being good, but they are different words for the same thing. Inflammation is healing, and it’s part of life. When we get sick, we have a whole-body immune response and have inflammation in our whole body. We eat foods that cause inflammation - like dairy, gluten, and highly processed foods.
If you get sick and have some inflammation in your entire body, your body will loosen up again as you move. You move your arms and legs and neck and back, but you can’t exactly move your kidney or your colon or one specific rib. It’s easy for a little stiffness to persist around your organs in your abdomen and joints that you don’t have a lot of conscious control over.
All your organs are attached to your abdominal wall, pelvis, and/or pelvic floor by connective tissue like fascia and ligaments. When these tissues get a little stiff, they can pull on your abdominal wall when you move. When they pull on the muscles in your abdominal wall, the muscles pull back a little, and become a little tense.
All your muscles are connected to other muscles by fascia that links muscles in chains, which I call fascial lines, that run from your hands or head to your feet. So when a muscle starts to pull somewhere, that tension is transmitted through your whole body.
As the muscle tension crosses joints, it restricts their motion. In order for a joint to move all the way, some muscles have to get shorter and some longer. If a muscle can’t fully lengthen, then the joint won’t be able to move all the way.
Your joints are use it or lose it, so over time this lack of mobility through the joint results in joint stiffness. This typically first occurs joints of the spine and ribs, and you’ll have a rib that can’t move as well as it should. The rib should move when you move and when you breathe, but you can’t exactly consciously wiggle a rib to get it loose, so once it’s stiff it’s easy for it to stay stiff.
If a rib can’t move well, then it will pull on any muscle that attaches to it, sending tension into more fascial lines, which causes more joint stiffness, which causes more tension.
Left untreated, we get progressively stiffer and stiffer over time, and our movement patterns change and adapt as we develop compensations for the mobility we have lost.
So far we have discussed 4 out of 5 major concepts - fascial line tension, joint stiffness, specific fascial stiffness around scars, organs, etc, and altered movement patterns.
The 5th concept is a bit more abstract. You are more than just bones and muscles - there is energy in your body. Whether this is simply electromagnetic energy from your nerves and heartbeat or something more, I do not know. What I do know is that it is associated with your nervous system and how your nervous system tries to protect you.
Your body does not feel pain. You have nerve sensors that can detect pressure, temperature, light tough, and vibration. Your nerves send all this information to your brain, and your brain processes all the information it receives. If your brain believes there is a threat to your safety, it will generate pain so that you can take action to protect yourself. We typically experience pain that is associated with tissue damage - you cut yourself, it hurts. However, this is not truly how pain works. If you stepped outside and slipped and sprained your ankle, it would most likely be quite painful.
However, if you were running away from a bear and you sprained your ankle, you probably would not feel your ankle until you were safe. Your brain knew that you injured yourself, but it didn’t give you pain because it wasn’t imminently threatening. So you see pain is dependent on the perception of threat and is not truly representative of tissue damage.
What this means is that on some level, if you are experiencing pain, your nervous system believes that you are in danger - and it will try to protect you. One of the ways it can try to protect you is by generating more muscle tension - this prepares you to flee or fight the threat. For instance, when someone severely injures their shoulder, they will hold their arm close to their body to protect it, and all their shoulder muscles tense up to make this happen. Unfortunately, since musculoskeletal pain is caused in part by muscle tension, this can be unhelpful.
Muscle tension caused by nervous system guarding tends to be diffuse and vague, whereas muscle tension in fascial lines from pulls on tissue is specific and localized. When you have muscle tension due to guarding, the tissue doesn’t move well, and the energy in your body also doesn’t move well.
If you do energy work to help the energy move better, the nervous system seems to calm down, the tense and guarded muscle relax, and the tissue moves better.
Tissue stiffness due to fascial line tension is predictable, but tissue stiffness due to nervous system guarding is a bit strange - it’s possible to have inhibition of muscles instead of tension that results in extra, uncontrolled motion instead of tension and stiffness.
These 5 elements interact in a unique way to create your problem. You have some tension in your muscles on your fascial lines, some stiffness in your joints, some movement pattern compensations, some fascial pulls around organs, scars, or old injuries, and some nervous system guarding.
You didn’t just wake up one day with all of this going on - something happened first, and then that led to the next thing, and over time the stiffness, tension, guarding, and compensation all piled up on top of each other.
We cannot change the thing at the bottom of that pile - the thing that happened first. It’s buried deep under layers of stiffness and guarding and compensation. But we can change the thing at the top of the pile - and then change the next thing, and the next, and slowly work our way down until we get to the bottom of the pile, and everything moves perfectly.
It’s far easier to stay loose than it is to get loose, and you’ll learn the tools you need to maintain yourself in optimal condition.
The majority of people feel meaningfully better within the first 3-4 visits, but it can take 6-12 months to completely resolve a problem in an adult who has had an issue for decades. Some people surprise me with how quickly they improve, however!