Iām honestly in awe of all this information and overwhelmed in the best way. You put so much work into this. Iām going to print it and read it carefully over the weekend šš»ā¤ļø
Using a silicone exercise band for variable resistance training is a great fascia workout. Excellent and quick results for our muscles, joints, and skin!
I discovered many year ago, through a treatment for an old injury, that it was the fascia causing the grief in my knee and not the meniscus. It was a treatment from a woman who practices and teaches Ortho-biology.
My current Osteopath also treats at the fascia level.
And my chiropractor has training on the importance of fascia.
It's extraordinary.
And I have talked with another practitioner who believes it's fascia, when twisted and injury untreated, that can cause people to hunch over later in life.
You were lucky to find practitioners who actually see this layer, Christine! So many still donāt, or dismiss fascia as some vague bodywork thing. And yes, old injuries almost never stay local. The body starts protecting, compensating, twisting around them and years later the workaround can become the posture.
Ortho-Bionomy by an experienced practitioner is a surprisingly school of treatment, as well as osteopathy. Facial tissue was substantially understood by both well before 2007! I had helpful myofacial treatments in the late 1990s. It's only western medicine that is so slow to see more than mechanisms, and then it loudly claims credit for "newly discovered!" LOL!!
The clinical lineage you mention is real. Osteopathy, Rolfing, John Barnes's myofascial release, Jean-Pierre Barral's visceral work, all of them were working with fascia hands-on long before 2007, and they deserve credit. But all of those traditions are themselves Western. Still founded osteopathy in Missouri. Rolf was in New York. Barnes is American. Barral is French. And the research that finally documented fascia mechanistically came from Stecco in Padua, Schleip in Germany, Langevin at Harvard, Wilke in Frankfurt, the 2018 NYU interstitium paper, the 2007 Harvard congress. All of that is Western academic medicine catching up to its own marginalized clinical traditions. The split here is not Western versus other cultures. It is mainstream biomedicine versus the manual therapy work being done inside the same Western tradition the whole time. Other medical systems had intuitions about connecting tissue, but the actual mechanistic research came from Western researchers. no other medical tradition has mapped or researched fascia as seriously as Western science has. That is the honest history.
so good! so happy to see fascia gaining so much attention of late. something TCM has always known ā having its own organ system within the five element theory (triple warmer/burner). understanding its inter connectivity and piezoelectricity. and itās fire element season so such a well timed article. learning about fascia was life changing for me. incredibly thoughtful share!
Thank you so much for reading and for the kind words! The piezoelectric properties of collagen are fascinating and I am planning to go deeper on that mechanism in a later piece in the series
Iām honestly in awe of all this information and overwhelmed in the best way. You put so much work into this. Iām going to print it and read it carefully over the weekend šš»ā¤ļø
Thank you, Anna!
Using a silicone exercise band for variable resistance training is a great fascia workout. Excellent and quick results for our muscles, joints, and skin!
I discovered many year ago, through a treatment for an old injury, that it was the fascia causing the grief in my knee and not the meniscus. It was a treatment from a woman who practices and teaches Ortho-biology.
My current Osteopath also treats at the fascia level.
And my chiropractor has training on the importance of fascia.
It's extraordinary.
And I have talked with another practitioner who believes it's fascia, when twisted and injury untreated, that can cause people to hunch over later in life.
You were lucky to find practitioners who actually see this layer, Christine! So many still donāt, or dismiss fascia as some vague bodywork thing. And yes, old injuries almost never stay local. The body starts protecting, compensating, twisting around them and years later the workaround can become the posture.
Ortho-Bionomy by an experienced practitioner is a surprisingly school of treatment, as well as osteopathy. Facial tissue was substantially understood by both well before 2007! I had helpful myofacial treatments in the late 1990s. It's only western medicine that is so slow to see more than mechanisms, and then it loudly claims credit for "newly discovered!" LOL!!
The clinical lineage you mention is real. Osteopathy, Rolfing, John Barnes's myofascial release, Jean-Pierre Barral's visceral work, all of them were working with fascia hands-on long before 2007, and they deserve credit. But all of those traditions are themselves Western. Still founded osteopathy in Missouri. Rolf was in New York. Barnes is American. Barral is French. And the research that finally documented fascia mechanistically came from Stecco in Padua, Schleip in Germany, Langevin at Harvard, Wilke in Frankfurt, the 2018 NYU interstitium paper, the 2007 Harvard congress. All of that is Western academic medicine catching up to its own marginalized clinical traditions. The split here is not Western versus other cultures. It is mainstream biomedicine versus the manual therapy work being done inside the same Western tradition the whole time. Other medical systems had intuitions about connecting tissue, but the actual mechanistic research came from Western researchers. no other medical tradition has mapped or researched fascia as seriously as Western science has. That is the honest history.
"effective'! "surprisingly effective"!! my bad!
It's frustrating that Substack doesn't have an edit feature for comments. I had a big fumble a while back. People inferred correctly, thankfully.
Very typical isn't it.
And, as long as people know about it, that's most important.
so good! so happy to see fascia gaining so much attention of late. something TCM has always known ā having its own organ system within the five element theory (triple warmer/burner). understanding its inter connectivity and piezoelectricity. and itās fire element season so such a well timed article. learning about fascia was life changing for me. incredibly thoughtful share!
Thank you so much for reading and for the kind words! The piezoelectric properties of collagen are fascinating and I am planning to go deeper on that mechanism in a later piece in the series
wow, just wow!!