Therapeutic Principles
Instead, I am constantly assessing the body as I work in an interactive fashion working on soft tissues such as muscles, fascia, ligaments, tendons, and connective tissue. I stretch within normal range of motion, realign tissues, remove adhesions, free entrapped nerves, improve mechanical advantage, free joints and calm hypertensive muscles.
I use anatomical principles to get us to the problem and then use acute perception to fine tune our work. This work requires a sense of touch that few people can master. I have to maintain a delicate balance of conscious informed knowledge and the ability to feel subtleties that are often blocked by conscious thought and preconceived perceptions.
For example, I will stretch a muscle that is adhered to surrounding tissues. It is like starting a train. As the first cars get going, the slack pulls out of the couplings between cars and more of the train starts to move. As I get to places that are not moving freely, it is like a stuck car on that train. Thus as I stretch the muscle we can, not only feel the adhesion, where it is positioned along the muscle. At that point, I can hold the exact tension so that the body at some level is aware of the adhesion and releases it. Other times I may use stretches to remove adhesions by moving joints within the normal range of motion taking the slack out until we feel the adhesions and then with a quick movement, free the adhesions because they are composed of tissue that is weaker than normal tissue but will stretch unless moved quickly. I relax muscles with gentle tension, support and the application of pressure on the golgi tendon organs of the muscles.
My trained sense of touch can find problems that do not show up on x-rays, MRI or lab tests. I find that if I try to rationally assess what is wrong that trying to fit my observations into a limited model causes me to miss things. I depend on the body to tell me what I need to do. Then I use science and training to evaluate what I have intuitively deduced. This is an interactive methodology that often consists of making assumptions and trying techniques that the body can accept or reject.
Because the work starts with intuitive perception that picks up on things that rational systems miss, I test what I am doing objectively. I have to make sure that the results are real and not something that I imagine to be true. Above all, even when I am working to fix a problem it is from the perspective of the whole person and is is in conjunction with the idea that profound wellness comes from the patient not the therapist.
I offer a form of therapy that is complementary to both traditional and alternative medicine. Many times medical approaches are best. At other times, alternatives like mine can offer relief when other choices either do not work or are more intrusive.