Fantastic talk from Dr. Chatterjee relating to chronic disease. It should always be about asking Why? https://drchatterjee.com/blog/video-is-it-possible-to-make-diseases-disappear.cfm

A Really worthwhile video regarding our view of 'normal'. I believe the same type of view should be used when we look at the physical body - we are all on a single continium https://www.facebook.com/rikalava12/videos/1529267363765604/?pnref=story

While surgery is often very necessary I still see many patients post surgery that do not report any benefits from their procedure. Surgery should always be considered as the final option - not the first. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/upshot/the-right-to-know-that-an-operation-is-next-to-useless.html?_r=0

A quick thought following a long day of delving deep into clients pasts. One of the problems I see a lot with pain and injury (especially the ones that seems hard to resolve) is that the pain/injury is often considered to exist in a bubble that is separate from the rest of the body unable to influence or be influenced by external factors e.g. you have pain in your left hip so that is where the problem is or the constant tightness and cramping in my calves is because I do not stretch them enough. While this may sometimes be true it is often not the case, hence the problem in resolving the issue. Maybe we think like this due to the increasing compartmentalisation of the body in Medicine where there seems to be a specialist for every area. Unfortunately we are not engines where we can take out the faulty bit, fix it and stick it back in – although this would make my job much easier! But body parts do not exist in a vacuum, they are part of a bigger complicated system that is constantly changing and adapting to its surroundings. We know that pain is the brains perception of threat in the body and this perception can be influenced by a number of factors including stress, lack of sleep, fear, anger, sadness, previous negative experiences of pain, emotional trauma and many more. These can all negatively affect how your body perceives pain and as a result the pain you feel. On top of this our bodies also have a beautiful compensation system that allows us to continue to move whilst minimizing exposure to areas of previous injury or areas that our brain sees as dysfunctional. Often it is the compensations created by these long forgotten bumps in life both physical and emotional that create a situation where the body can now no longer carry on as normal and starts asking for help. Lack of pain does not mean good health and while the presence of pain tells you the brain perceives a threat worthy of your attention it does not always tell you where the problem is or what it is. Sometimes both therapist and client just need to take a breath and dig a bit deeper.

I haven’t posted in a while but, as the type of work I do evolves, I am seeing some wonderful and unusual cases, which I hope to share over the next while. They serve to highlight the wonder that is the human body and brain. Apologies for the length. Last week a teenage female boxer presented to clinic with a constant headache, which had been present for over a month. She had no recollection of experiencing any trauma; it just started one day. She had attended her GP and tried different medications, including migraine medication. Unfortunately, none of these had helped her symptoms. She described the pain as being constant across her whole head but worse at the back. Assessment found very tender muscles at the base of her skull, called the sub-occipitals. These muscles are responsible for helping control fine movements of the skull and are often linked with headaches. The question was, why were they so tender? Watching the client walking, it was clear that she presented a forward head posture, which would cause the area at the base of the skull to become compressed and tighten these little muscles. Why did the body think this was a good idea? 3 possibilities come to mind: 1. It was a learned position from daily activities or from her boxing stance (she extended her neck slightly when she went into her stance). 2. The client was running a compensation pattern to protect something else in her system that the brain saw as a bigger threat and this required the neck to be in this position. 3. This was a legacy compensation pattern that once served an important protective purpose but had overstayed its usefulness in the body and was now a hindrance. The biggest thing in her history was a large scar left from an emergency appendix surgery a few years ago. Testing showed that this scar was still affecting the proper functioning of the muscles around her pelvis and lower back as the body was still trying to protect the scar. I did some gently scar work and reset some of the receptors in the scar to try to reduce the dysfunctional signal the brain was receiving from it which would reduce the brains need to protect the area. Moving to the base of the skull, and with very gentle pressure, I tried to change the tension across the whole area to reduce stress, tenderness and tightness in the sub-occipital muscles and the small nerves and arteries that travel across this area. This was all to calm the nervous system and reduce the level of threat this area might be experiencing. The final piece was to guide the client in introducing better movement into this area at the base of the neck. We got her to gently do a ‘cogs’ exercise, courtesy of Gary Ward, which creates specific movement throughout the whole spine. This allowed the spine to gently and safely explore movements that it had previously avoided. It would also help to re-integrate some lower back movement that was missing because of the constant guarding of her abdominal scar. Her home-work was to continue with this exercise for the week. A week later she came back with a big smile and reported that she was headache free for the last 5 days. I continued to gently encourage safe movement at the base of her skull (thanks Ronnie), which was now responding normally to touch with no tenderness. I also encouraged her to return to her GP to follow up with the other recommended investigations. She was only to return to clinic if the pain came back and so far (another week later) she has continued to be pain free. Which of the techniques I used made a difference? Maybe all of them, maybe none of them. Perhaps her body just needed to experience safe movement and feel less threatened from past experiences, in order to create the confidence she needed to move her spine freely again.

Wishing all my friends and clients a peaceful and pain-free New Year.