CARNIVAL GAMES AND SOLUTIONS FOR CHRONICALLY ADHESED FASCIA
When I travel to St. Louis via I-44, just past St. James (which is just past Rolla) sits a business on the south side of the highway called Hi Striker. From their sign it’s easy to tell what sort of equipment they manufacture and sell. Hi Strikers are the gizmos you find at carnivals and county fairs that require you to hit a lever with a wooden sledgehammer. If you hit the lever hard enough it rings the bell at the top, and you win a prize. It’s all or nothing. Anything short of the bell, and you won’t be bringing home the oversized stuffed gorilla.
When people injure themselves in any number of different ways (SPORTS, CAR WRECKS, REPETITIVE WORK, POOR POSTURE, HORSES, FALLS, ETC, etc, etc) they sometimes end up with ADHESED FASCIA. Fascia is the thin, cellophane-like membrane that covers muscles (in most cases, “MUSCLE INJURIES” are actually injuries to the Fascia). There are any number of reasons these injuries can be problematic, but try this one on for size. Fascia — the most abundant and most pain-sensitive connective tissue in the body — cannot be seen with advanced imaging techniques such as MRI (HERE).
This means that lots of you CHRONIC PAIN SUFFERERS who are reading this have been through lots and lots of doctor visits and tests, only to be told there is nothing really wrong with them except MAYBE A LITTLE ARTHRITIS. Trust me when I tell you that it won’t take long for doctors to start mentally labeling you as a (insert one or more of the following here _____________ drug seeker, malingerer, crazy, lazy, disability seeker, etc, etc). I only know because I have been watching this scenario play out for the past quarter century.
Part of what makes my clinic different is that for most problems (HERNIATED DISCS ARE AN EXCEPTION), I don’t set you up on a treatment schedule. If you feel that what I do was beneficial, give me a call and I’m happy to see you again (HERE IS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE). Let me give you a couple of examples from earlier this week.
An unnamed individual who I will call Carl made an appointment to see me. When I walked in my office to sit down and talk to him and look things over, I discovered that this individual had been seeing various chiropractors once a month for the past twenty years (he had just recently moved to this area).
I’m not against some sort of CHIROPRACTIC MAINTENANCE as long as that’s what it really is — healthy people coming in to “maintain” their health. Unfortunately, all too often what we see in my profession are people coming in over and over and over again for the exact same problems, simply because they hurt. In many cases (probably most cases) this is not maintenance. They get adjusted and it helps for a bit, and over the course of a few days or a few weeks they are back in the same boat again.
I talked to Carl, examined him, and brought him to a treatment room. In 15 minutes, I had his neck and back moving better than they had moved in years — before I adjusted him. I did not make an appointment for him, leaving him drop-jaw amazed at the whole experience (HERE is the video of him talking about his experience).
I had another patient this week — A LONG DISTANCE PATIENT — who had CONTACTED ME a couple of months ago wanting to know if I worked on X, Y, and Z. He told me that my site had resonated with him, but that he had been through so much THERAPY and ADJUSTING that he wondered what could possibly make what I do different than what he had already done. I sent him THIS and he realized immediately that he had not had his SCAR TISSUE dealt with, leaving him perpetually tethered.
You see, breaking the Scar Tissue out of Fascia sometimes requires a certain degree of intensity. Although that intensity is different for each and every individual, their bell must be rung. Huh? Remember the Hi Striker game? Failing to ring the bell is failure — even if you get within an inch. You either swing the sledge hammer hard enough to ring the bell or you don’t. With Tissue Remodeling, there is a similar principle in play. You either GET INTENSE ENOUGH to break the tissue or you don’t. And when you do, the results can be nothing short of amazing (HERE).
Lots of people are led to believe that if they will just get enough therapy, adjustments, stretching, exercise, etc, it will eventually break through their adhesion and “UNTETHER” them. While this is certainly true of most problems — problems that tend to be relatively minor — for serious problems that involve hardcore scarring and adhesions, the intensity used for breaking said adhesions may, depending on the situation, need to be ramped up a bit (or maybe even more than a bit).
Just remember that your treatment must ring the bell to be doing you any good. While the analogy of treatment being like peeling an onion is fine and mostly true, a whole lot of sub-threshold treatment is a whole lot of sub-threshold treatment, just like a whole lot of nothing is still nothing. Be sure to like, share or follow on FACEBOOK if you appreciate our work!
One Response
I am interested to know just what ‘ringing the bell’ entails. It sounds as though you use a certain degree of force? I have had fascia pain and tightness for 6 months now and been seeing a physiotherapist who has used acupuncture, a pulse machine and massage. I was also doing simple yoga exercises. All was eventually going well until I recently tugged too hard when putting on my socks. I now have lots of pain and stiffness and feel like I have gone back to square one.